Ask Slashdot: ORB Drives, Anyone?

Chris Herborth asks: "Castlewood Systems is apparently shipping their ORB drive (you know, 2 gig removable cheaper than a 250MB ZIP drive, with media at $40) now to at least two US distributors (ASI) and (Wintec). So, has anyone seen one yet? How well does it work under non-Windows operating systems? I was going to invest in something useful for doing backups soon, but I'm afraid to just order one of these (shipping to/from Canada is a real pain in the butt) in case something goes wrong or it only works properly with Windows." Your thoughts, folks?

Comments

Have one here

[Scott Wunsch]

I have one here right now. I haven't had a chance to play with it under Linux yet (it's not actually mine), but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work. This is an IDE version; the SCSI versions aren't available yet AFAIK. It's really nice and fast too; you usually can't even tell the difference between it and a regular hard drive.

BTW, they should be available in Canada. I believe my dad ordered this one from a Canadian distributor, anyhow.

Feel free to contact me if you want to know more :-).

Guaranteed to last forever?

[gavinhall]

Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:

Scientists discover new form of matter: DLTite. A lump of this substance remains 100% unchanged after exposure to the elements (including magnetism, extreme heat (the interior of a star), extreme cold (10 degrees below absolute zero), and the end of the universe (only tested once)).

The only problem is, since it can't be modified, you can't make a backup onto it.

I've had one for a month

[Fone626]

I got the EIDE version a little over a month ago. It installs into a linux machine flawlessly.
The only problem that I had was couple weeks after I got the drive I heard a grinding noise. Turned out that linux never spun the drive down even once in that first 2 weeks and I never used it, so it ended up grinding off the cylinders off the far edge of the platter. I promptly exchanged it and set a spindown with hdparm and its been working beautifully ever since.

I would definatly recommend this drive, just make sure that you either use the drive a lot or get it to spin down.
Seems like the drive should move the head around all by itself to avoid damage like what happened to me though.

I have one

[adraken]

Well I'd like to add to the discussion as saying that I DO have one of these drives, and I must say that they are wonderful. I bought an Internal EIDE one and it came with a "Tools" disk. It is almost full. (In win95) However, the only thing important on there is the "ORB Tools" (which is approximately 3mb). Everything else are program demos and videos. I promptly used the ORB Tools to change the status of the drive from "Removable" to "Non-removable". Then I used Partition Magic 4.0 to remove the current FAT16 partition with a ext2fs partition and rebooted into Linux. (cfdisk can be used also if you wish) I just mounted /dev/hdb1 and it worked perfectly. The only caveat that I have is that they have no support for Linux/UNIX whatso ever. However, considering the community, it's not necessary. Also, an initial (recommended) defect scan revealed only 43 bad sectors out of a couple billion (IIRC) (nice margin of error). One would expect 0 bad sectors on a traditional hard drive, however, one must remember that these are portable disks, and are much more suseptible [sic!] to damage, et cetera. I bought it because of the price/performance. The price is incredible. $180 (on Wintec) for the drive, and $30 per disk! (U.S.) These prices are incredible. Compared with a Jaz 2GB, these drive are dirt cheap. I have not benchmarked the read/write performance, but I plan on trying HD Tach to benchmark this. (I do not have a registered version, so I cannot test writing.) Performance is virtually indistinguishable from my 3.2gb hard drive. I regularly download large amounts of GNOME sources and compile them on the ORB drive, they compile at regular speeds. I also keep my MP3s and the Star Wars trailers on there. (no slow down or stuttering, also no data loss experienced). Another nice feature of the ORB drive is that the drive fits in a 3.5" drive bay. Also, the disks themselves are SLIGHTLY smaller than Zip disks. If you are really worried about unreliability, the disks are warranteed for 1 year.

All in all, I would highly recommend this drive for everyone, although I would like to see some numbers regarding percentage of failure, but beyond the initial bad 43 sectors (I bought this around the middle of March), no new bad sectors have come up.

ORB experiences & mailing list

[Chmarr]

For those that are interested, there's an ORB mailing list for linux users: linuxorb@tatoosh.com

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 dont have excellent linux support. YOU need windows to switch the drive from fixed to removable (or you're going to have problems treating them as removable disks). Also, they dont 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.