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Castlewood Orb any good?

E

Erasmus-X

Platinum Member
I'm taking a Windows NT Administration class for my MCSE cert and it requires that I have either an ORB or a Jaz disk to store my own copy of NT4 Server. I figured I would just buy one of these drives so I have something to read my disks from home.

ORB seems to carry several advantages over the Jaz 2GB drive:

- Cheaper drive
- Much cheaper media
- Faster access time

But the big question is, how many of you ORB owners are satisfied with your purchase? Are these drives reliable? I'm hoping that they aren't as bad as my Zip100 ATAPI drive, which has been replaced twice already (I swear, I've never seen one of these drives last for more than a year). I have my eye on the external SCSI version of the ORB drive. Any comments?

Thanks in advance.
 
If you are using them to boot from based off an external scsi port, maybe they will let you cheat and bring an external scsi drive, the increased speed would raise your productivity exceptionally.
 
Ewwww......negative feedback 🙁

How does the ORB compare to the Jaz 2GB in terms of reliability? I've been through a lot of disks on my Zip100 that were either ruined by being "eaten" or taken down with the drive by that notorious "click of death." I've grown to hate it.

Xanathar:

Well, that would be nice, but the systems in class only have removable bays that support IDE drives, not SCSI (haha, ya think they'd invest in that?). I know you get downgraded performance using removable storage, but I don't really care about that because this is just for a class.
 
Jaz is much more reliable. The ORB had a lot of potential, and a lot of delays. The fact that it is using MR technology, there is still contamination problems with the media, although castlewood claims to have some seal system and the fact that when the drive spins up to 5400rpm any dust on the disk will be blown off. The drive itself is for the most part reliable, the media is not. I went thru 2 units, the 3rd one I didnt even bother opening it - just threw it up on fleabay
 
Hmmmm, then maybe I will invest the extra $150 in the Jaz 2GB drive. The only thing that really concerns me about Jaz is that the media costs 3 to 4 times as much as ORB for 200MB less space. Oh well....
 
I have Orb and I am not happy.It is dead now.I will go today and buy new media to see if I can revive it but at this stage it is not my choice for someone.

You sound like you are in a classsroom environment like
I was. Will they let you bring in your own removable HDD? That is a great choice.You could dual boot or have multiple O.S. on different Removable HDD.s you can get the device for about $20-$30 and HDDS for less than $100.

Thats what I do.
 
I agree the orb sucks. It is the descendant of SyQuest. BXBoards did a review and agreed its performance was good but said his drive had to be replaced 3? times in a month or 2.
 
Yeah, I think I might just go with a removable hard drive instead. The systems are equipped with removable drive bays and today the teacher was even encouraging the use of one because they're overall cheaper and have better performance. Thanks for the advice guys, I think I'll avoid getting an ORB and really don't want to blow $350 on a SCSI Jaz drive when I save money and get a faster processor (which I need more).
 
Good choice. And you will be up ! more HDD for your 'puter.Install the drive bay in your home pc and your good to go. Enjoy 😉
 
While we're on that subject, are there any removable drive mounts available that fit in 3.5" drive bays? I'm probably going to put a removable drive on my Dell, which is out of 5.25" bays.
 
I have never seen one of thos, and the only way I could see that working is if it held a 2.5" laptop drive. Which would be significantly more expensive than a typical 3.5" drive.

Another option would be a parallel port -> external ide case. Then you could mount the 5 1/4" bay for a 3.5" drive in the external case.

Or just buy a new case. 🙂

cot
 
Yeah, if you've got space in another machine, no problem.

Accessing a hard drive over 100BT is actually bearable 🙂

cot
 
orb and syquest suck bigtime. I've had 4(!) sparq drives go kaput on me. I have it packaged and its ready to be sold to computer ren.
 
Ack sorry to raise a dead thread... I just bought 2 of these drives (150$ total with 3 disks) and ive been having trouble getting either of them to read a disk🙁 Both of them just sit there blinking amber and then spit the disk out. ive tried all sorts of combinations but no luck. Anyone have any luck with these? Maybe its time to fleabay them... at least I should get about 130-150 each plus another 30$ for the extra drive so I guess Ill have made a tidy profit if I do. I would prefer to at least have one working however. the orb tools show that both of them are supposedly working fine so I dunno...
 
backup? ugh.. no actually I wanted it as sort of a supercd for mp3s. its a real pain in the ass finding the cd I want with the mp3s I want to hear then sticking it in and dealing with the annoyances of cdrom reading. I already have 12gb worth of mp3s on my drive but just plugging in an extra 2,2gbs would have been a nice way to do it.
 
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