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

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.