Customer Reviews

Castlewood Systems ORB2PE01 2.2GB Parallel Port Removable Media Drive

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Remember when you got your Zip drive and suddenly floppies seemed, well, puny? After a bit of time with the Orb drive, you'll feel the same way about your Zips.

The two devices are in about the same price range and are both available in external and internal configurations. The Orb media is two to three times more expensive (for now), but look at it this way--you could hold 20 Zip disks on one Orb disk! Add the fact that the Orb drive is as fast (or faster) than many for-real hard drives, and you've got a winner.

My one complaint? The fiddly door on the front keeps dropping down, getting in the way, and makes swapping disks a bit of a hassle. A small price to pay, however, for 2.2 gigs of fast, removable storage. I've had mine for a month now, and it continues to work like a charm.

Purchased this drive about two months ago and have found it to be the best (and cheapest) option for massive amounts of storage. Despite some reported problems in various reviews, I have not had even one problem with this drive and routinely use it to back up my hd and to store multimedia like MP3's. At $ for each 2.2gig cartridge, the ORB can't be beat!

I bought my Orb drive for home use on the same day that I picked up a Zip drive for use at work. I cannot begin to describe how different these two products are.

The Orb behaves almost exactly like a hard drive. It's very, very fast. The only noticeable difference is the slight spin time (which you can adjust through the software). The Zip (while the media may be ubiquitous) is really too small to be useful these days. The addition of the 250 mb model is a step in the right direction, but it's clear that Iomega dropped the ball here. Castlewood has bridged the gap between the capacity of the very slow tape backup drive and the convenience of a removeable disk.