Native USB devices are boring. Let's see if we can connect native SCSI devices to an iPhone. First up, the Castlewood ORB Drive! Enjoy!
-
Updated 2023-07-12: Hello, Guest! Welcome back, and be sure to check out this follow-up post about our outage a week or so ago.
SCSI Castlewood ORB Drive connected to iPhone?
- Thread starter napabar
- Start date
Somehow they skipped past my attention back in that time period. I just learned about them recently. Apparently, they could be problematic over time?
omidimo
Well-known member
They were very temperamental, we used them to store students projects, and if they were dropped it was over, a little dust, it could be over, not as bad Jaz drives, but they still could fail. They did not last long as part of the workflow, I think 1.5 years. We switched over to DVD-RAM and FireWire drives when we switched to B&W G3s.
I still have a drive in storage and a dozen or so Orb disks in storage, not sure if I will ever be able to read them, or even if they work.
I still have a drive in storage and a dozen or so Orb disks in storage, not sure if I will ever be able to read them, or even if they work.
Orb is interesting. I wouldn't mind grabbing one at some point, but I would almost certainly never use it. They're a lot less trustworthy than Jaz, or even Zip, or REV or any Syquest drive, for that matter.
It's my understanding (granted, I haven't, you know, used either of these systems personally) that Orb was given to fairly catastrophic failures, almost immediately out of the box.
It was, at every stage, too good to be true in terms of pricing and the way they built them. In particular, Castlewood systems contracted the manufacturing out to multiple companies and didn't do particularly good QA after the fact, and so the drives and disks weren't always within the tolerances that that kind of system really needed to be in.
They failed more immediately and catastrophically and often with fewer warning signs than zip, and when these things were new, that could easily have meant taking all of someone's information.
I suspect there was a combination of bad design and bad manufacturing at play here. Iomega introduced a later removable hard platter disk system called REV that scaled up to 120 gigabytes and was on sale until ~2011 or so, that either was much less popular out the gate (probably also true given that REV exists almost entirely inside the "USB era") and/or was much more reliable out the gate (probably also true, it's not difficult to be more reliable than Orb.)
It's a bummer, but in retrospect I'm kind of glad I never touched it. I remember wanting it badly, as an add-on for my PowerMac 7300, pretty much expressly for the purpose of backing up my whole boot disk and making alternative configurations I could image in and out, or just booting from the cartridge disk. They were if not half, much less than the 1/2-gig Jaz drives were at the time, and only a little bit more costly than Zip, but of course: 2.2 gigs. (it was $200 for the drive and $30 for each cartridge.)
Just kind of, what that pricing meant in context, from this US MacWarehouse from 2000 (PDF):
A 2-gig Jaz external drive was $330 and the cartridges were $100 a pop. Zip250 drives were $140, 100 was down to $100. Zip disks were 12.50 each and $10 each respectively, as part of 8 and 10 packs for $100. By the time of this catalog I'm looking at, Orb had fallen to $180 for the SCSI drive and $200 for the USB drive, but the carts were still $30 a piece of $80 for a 3-pack.
The real gotcha here is that what MacWorld said in late 1998 was basically still true, except more. LaCie was selling a 10-gig USB hard disk for $200 and a 20-gig one for $230. SCSI and Firewire disks were obviously still the high end performance champions, and if you had need for it, LaCie had these firewire 7200RPM desktop external hard disks available:
30GB - $400
45GB - $600
75GB - $990
The other backdrop for all of this is that SCSI CD-RW drives were under $300 and CD0R and -RW media prices were basically in free fall. The LaCie branded CDRW media is $70 for a 10-pack, for example/
This was also the era where you could still just buy tape drives for your home computer out of a catalog.
I suspect what was happening was Syed Iftikar, having figured out what Iomega did to make Zip so popular, figured he could out-Iomega Iomega by releasing a "slightly above Jaz capacities" removable disk system for "slightly above Zip" pricing.
Quality killed it, and if Quality didn't, the fact that giant USB hard disks and CDs and DVD-RAM (which I don't actually see listed in here outside of the 500 dual sawtooth, for reasons that aren't clear to me) were either cheaper-to-start or cheaper overall for the number of gigs people imagined themselves wanting in the near to mid future, plus the fact that many people had already committed to a particular removable ecosystem, meant it was probably doomed to at least obscurity regardless.
It's my understanding (granted, I haven't, you know, used either of these systems personally) that Orb was given to fairly catastrophic failures, almost immediately out of the box.
It was, at every stage, too good to be true in terms of pricing and the way they built them. In particular, Castlewood systems contracted the manufacturing out to multiple companies and didn't do particularly good QA after the fact, and so the drives and disks weren't always within the tolerances that that kind of system really needed to be in.
They failed more immediately and catastrophically and often with fewer warning signs than zip, and when these things were new, that could easily have meant taking all of someone's information.
I suspect there was a combination of bad design and bad manufacturing at play here. Iomega introduced a later removable hard platter disk system called REV that scaled up to 120 gigabytes and was on sale until ~2011 or so, that either was much less popular out the gate (probably also true given that REV exists almost entirely inside the "USB era") and/or was much more reliable out the gate (probably also true, it's not difficult to be more reliable than Orb.)
It's a bummer, but in retrospect I'm kind of glad I never touched it. I remember wanting it badly, as an add-on for my PowerMac 7300, pretty much expressly for the purpose of backing up my whole boot disk and making alternative configurations I could image in and out, or just booting from the cartridge disk. They were if not half, much less than the 1/2-gig Jaz drives were at the time, and only a little bit more costly than Zip, but of course: 2.2 gigs. (it was $200 for the drive and $30 for each cartridge.)
Just kind of, what that pricing meant in context, from this US MacWarehouse from 2000 (PDF):
A 2-gig Jaz external drive was $330 and the cartridges were $100 a pop. Zip250 drives were $140, 100 was down to $100. Zip disks were 12.50 each and $10 each respectively, as part of 8 and 10 packs for $100. By the time of this catalog I'm looking at, Orb had fallen to $180 for the SCSI drive and $200 for the USB drive, but the carts were still $30 a piece of $80 for a 3-pack.
The real gotcha here is that what MacWorld said in late 1998 was basically still true, except more. LaCie was selling a 10-gig USB hard disk for $200 and a 20-gig one for $230. SCSI and Firewire disks were obviously still the high end performance champions, and if you had need for it, LaCie had these firewire 7200RPM desktop external hard disks available:
30GB - $400
45GB - $600
75GB - $990
The other backdrop for all of this is that SCSI CD-RW drives were under $300 and CD0R and -RW media prices were basically in free fall. The LaCie branded CDRW media is $70 for a 10-pack, for example/
This was also the era where you could still just buy tape drives for your home computer out of a catalog.
I suspect what was happening was Syed Iftikar, having figured out what Iomega did to make Zip so popular, figured he could out-Iomega Iomega by releasing a "slightly above Jaz capacities" removable disk system for "slightly above Zip" pricing.
Quality killed it, and if Quality didn't, the fact that giant USB hard disks and CDs and DVD-RAM (which I don't actually see listed in here outside of the 500 dual sawtooth, for reasons that aren't clear to me) were either cheaper-to-start or cheaper overall for the number of gigs people imagined themselves wanting in the near to mid future, plus the fact that many people had already committed to a particular removable ecosystem, meant it was probably doomed to at least obscurity regardless.
Similar threads
