Better removable media

By SKillBot August 12, 1999 6:31 PM

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Castlewood Systems' Orb is a removable cartridge drive that stores 2 GB of data on a cartridge about the size of a Zip disk. The drive costs $199, and cartridges cost $30. Its claimed maximum sustained data transfer rate is 12.2 MB per second, faster than any other removable media. Only time will tell about reliability, since these drives have just been available since June and are based on magnetic media. Some physical things to watch out for: the SCSI connector and cable are the high-density 50-pin variety, so you may need a different SCSI cable to connect it to your Mac. It has no power switch and its SCSI ID selector is an easily-bumped sliding switch on its side, from which you can choose from four pre-selected SCSI ID numbers, including 0, which should reserved for the internal hard drive (!). To keep up with Orb issues, see the special Web page at Macintouch.

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