Rating: - Good product when it works
Under most conditions, a great product. Fast, relatively affordable drive, compact media, convenient. But you have to consider replacement costs when you buy. I've had two of them fail -- one SCSI, one IDE -- both within weeks of the warranty ending (i.e. 13-15 months after purchase). Castlewood's fee to repair these things is $108 per drive, which is only [slightly] less than a brand new one! Factor in that you get a ...disc included when you buy a new drive, and basically it's a wash -- you might as well just buy a new drive! Competitor Iomega's track record isn't so great either, so I'm sticking with the Orb, but be careful -- the cost of this drive might be ...per year.
Rating: - beats CD-RW
Very fast, very reliable, and your system sees it as another hard drive, which is much more convenient than CD-RW. Using Norton Ghost, I can back up 3gb of data to one disk in about 15-20 minutes. I can also back up my drive at work in 10 minutes. It is the only MR drive on the market, which makes it the fastest. ... The only drawback is that it isn't optical storage, so you have to remember not to subject the disks to static or other magnetic fields, but I've been using this drive for 2 years and this technology (starting with the Syquest Syjet) for 5 years and have never had corrupted data.
Rating: - Does what it claims to do, nothing fancy.
To date I've used the internal IDE version of the Orb drive in both Windows PCs and Mac G4 towers with good success. The drive functions as you'd expect. Performance is superior to that of comparable Iomega Jaz drives, though the Orb does have a much longer spin up/down cycle upon disk insertion / extraction.
The drive door is also a bit inconvenient, as it requires two hands: one to hold the door open and the other to insert the disk.
Mac users also take note that as of the time of this writing (Early June) no MacOS X drivers exist, but if you run MacOS 9.1 or earlier it works well.
For the price this drive performs well and I have no major complaints.
Rating: - good concept- horrible product
In theory, this is an excellent product- However, it is horrible. It is the reliability of the data storage that is the killer. Once you put data on a disk, you have to cross your fingers and hope that it hasn't become corrupted.
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