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I remember all the technologies out there like Imation SuperDisk or Castlewood Orb. I used to be rooting for the Orb drive to win the market and become the standard. At the time (1999) I think it could have been a killer product. It used hard-drive-type platters in a reasonably sized cartridge, with a 2.2 GB disk going for about $20. Also, reviews said that the drives were a lot faster than Zip disk.

But now, like you said, with CD burners and their media being so cheap and decently quick, plus the addition of Mt. Rainier to the RW drives, Zip clones have no more reasons to hang around. And from what I've heard, Iomega can't even get CD drives right.

Since SonicBlue announced the ReplayTV 4000, I am sure that content providers are crapping themselves trying to find a way to short-circuit the features of this device. Briefly, the ReplayTV 4000 uses your existing home network and broadband connection to both obtain programming information fromt he ReplayTV servers, as well as enable users to share TV shows both over their local networks and over the Internet. Granted, it could take hours to transmit a single show from your ReplayTV to someone else's across the country, but certainly less time than it would take to ship a video tape.

When ReplayTV was a brand new venture, they started selling units on their own which had built-in FireWire (IEEE 1394) ports on them. The idea was to be able to archive existing program content stored in the DVR onto external media, or to supplement the hard disk already in the DVR. These ports were never activated, apparently under pressure from the entertainment industry which feared rampant piracy. Plans to create DVR devices that took removable media (such as ORB disks, a plan which CastleWood had been discussing openly on their web site) were similarly scrapped by other manufacturers.

Now, it would seem that SonicBlue, which acquired ReplayTV, is making it trivial for people to effectively copy TV shows to their friends. Granted, this system probably doesn't allow anonymous copying, so casual piracy will be reduced (no "Napster-esque" video sharing), but there's nothing preventing someone in one geographic region from sharing a show that is either blocked or unavailable in another geographic region. Pay-per-view for sporting events will suffer if such devices proliferate -- you can easily get around blackout restrictions by having your friend in another area record the game for you.

Previous posters have already made the point that the per-gigabyte cost of this new IOmega drive is preposterously high. But if compact, removable media is what you need, may I humbly suggest you look at the Castlewood ORB?

I have one of their external SCSI units. The drive is also available in EIDE, USB and IEEE 1394 (Firewire) flavors. I have five platters, which I use to hold mostly games. The drive works flawlessly with Linux and BeOS, and only exhibits one minor annoyance under Windows (which is probably not Castlewood's fault; Windows doesn't completely flush the desktop's caches when ejecting a platter). The drive seems a bit slow at writing data. This may be because I have the drive configured for highest reliability rather than speed. Though I haven't subjected it to especially hard use, I have yet to suffer any data loss. The media cost is almost reasonable at $30 for 2.2 Gigs.

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with Castlewood other than as a satisfied customer.

Schwab

Well, I just bought a new removable media drive a couple days ago called the "Orb" and it rocks...It beats the hell out of ZIP drives left and right. Check it out:

* 2.2GB storage

* Much faster than ZIP...like an older HDD

* Cost: ~$169

*** 2.2 GB Cartridge cost: ONLY ~$20!!!!!!

* int EIDE, int/ext SCSI, ext USB

And, as if that weren't enough...here's the REAL gem: The external USB drive is ACTUALLY the external SCSI drive, but with a SCSI-to-USB adapter, so you can plug it in to your SCSI adapter at home for SPEED, but still take it anywhere and use it through USB! KICKS ASS!

Check it out:

There is also a good review at www.tomshardware.com

-Brandon

Imation sells disks that hold 120 MB, have the same dimensions as regular 3,5" disks, and the drive can also read old (1.44MB) disks. These things rock. The drive will cost you about $75-$100 or something.
Castlewood manufactures 2.2 GB portable disks that cost $30 each (the drive is a little expensive though)
IOMega sells 100 and 250 MB disks for around $10 or so

I'd advise you to try the Imation drive, then decide for yourself whether you like it. I sure did.

Tapes decay... tapes are bad... dollar per meg, I've found that Castlewood ORB drives are the best. 2.2 gigs to the disk... very nice...

Format them however you want, but don't start adding extra crap to the players *now*. I really don't want to find out that the DVD drive I bought last month doesn't have the extra laser it needs to view all the "new DVD's"...

I also don't want the media to control the format, but people tend to naturally shy away from the proprietary solutions that cost them. And I know if it did, I'd hear about it on Slashdot first. I hope this whole stupid DeCSS thing blows over so I can watch The Matrix on my new computer. :)

...and look into ORB drives. I don't have one, but that's what I'd get, at the moment. At the moment, they're 2.2GB removable media, and I'm eagerly awaiting whatever the next generation of this technology will bring. Anyone who does have one want to share their experiences? I've heard it can be set up under Linux, maybe I'll buy one in a few months, or wait for something bigger. :)
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pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.

Hacking what Jon has done so that one can copy DVD's on home equipment is completely impractical.

I hope that the defense does not try to make any arguments along those lines, because it will totally get blown away.

Sequential media (i.e. tape) is down to around the same cost as DVD movies (a little over $2 per gigabyte) now. It is already practical (in terms of dollars) to do it if you don't mind a somewhat cheezy solution which lacks the advantages of random access. Considering that VHS still isn't dead yet, I think sequential media is good enough for most movie viewing purposes.

And that's just today. The cost per gigabyte keep falling. 5 years ago, 100M Zip/Syquest drives were "cool". $15 for 100M disk = $150 per Gig. Nowdays you can get removable random access storage at about one tenth that price, using an Orb drive. 30 Gig removable disks (enough to hold 6 movies) for $20 apiece is totally conceivable within 5 years. That's just how things go.

Please don't try the impracticality argument. It will just give The Enemy a free strawman victory.

• record programs to Orb disks or to DVD-RAMs (or recordable DVDs when they're available)
  
• put an ethernet port on the set-top box so I can wire it to my DSL line (take care of the thin up pipe)
  
• program the box over the web with my preferred channel recording schedule
  
• watch the program via the web (over that DSL uplink), preferably from work ;)
  
• mail the program (as an MPEG file) to other people
  

Send an empty message to linuxorb-subscribe@tatoosh.com to subscribe.

There's also a web page at www.tatoosh.com/linuxorb/

I purchased two orb drives, and one extra disk (total of three disks). The extra disk I purchased had a sector error, but the drive supports sector remapping, so zeroing the disk will fix those problems. I returned the disk since it was only a week old. This seems to be a common problem; 3 of the 9 disks I know about have had some sort of problem; hopefully their quality control will improve over time.

The drives don't have excellent linux support. One needs windows to switch the drive from fixed to removable (or you're going to have problems treating them as removable disks). Also, they don't use a standard 'eject' IOCTL. Apparently, Castlewood are releasing the OEM manual so linux support can be written for these things.

Apart from those shortcomings, I think the drives are great. The media is convenient, and cheap (although signifigantly pricier here in Australia). The access time is noticably slower than a hard-drive, but the sustained throughput rate is excellent. (ie, I can dd if=/dev/orb very quick, but cp -axv of lots of little files is a tad slower than I'd like).

A warning, though. The place in the US I got it from was having troubles getting the media. So... buy a few extras if they're available.