Great, until it breaks and you have to wait a month for a new one...
Written: Nov 29 '99
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Product Rating:
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Pros: fast access, big storage for little cash, cheap media, SCSI or USB speed!!
Cons: Breaks VERY easily and takes a long time to RMA, no PC SCSI
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| alexaugot's Full Review: Archived Computers & Internet Reviews |
Writing this review for the Castlewood Orb is somewhat painful. Its such a great product, with so much potential for being an instant classic, but because of 1 major flaw it loses sight of that greatness. The Orb is a 2.2 gig portable/removable hard drive that works just like a fixed hard drive. In fact, when I first plugged it in, Windows detected it as a fixed disk. One note about this review, because Castlewood hasn't released a PC SCIS, I'm using the Mac SCSI on a PC. This isn't any problem, according toyou. Castlewood who lists right on the box that the Orb can be used with just about any OS. The only thing you can't do with it, is take out the disks without restarting the computer.
Anyway, when I installed the Orb and booted up into Windows, it detected fine. Now all I had to do was perform a kinda complex series of commands using fdisk and format on the mac formatted disk. After doing that, it ran exactly like a normal hard drive, with about 12 megs per second transfer. I tossed a bunch of mp3's on there, and tested their play back. No skips or pauses, just as if it was running from a regular hard drive. I tested application performance by playing GTA 2 ( Grand Theft Auto 2, an intensive 3d game ) off the Orb. I only noticed minor slowdowns when a lot of objects were on the screen, but it wasn't anything that stopped the play. The last test I performed was a CD ROM burn test. Using my S&F SCSI Rocket I burned a 500 meg data CD, and the Fight Club soundtrack. No fails or imperfections, which is great because I always get fails off my EDIE hard drives.
This is the hard part of the review, because this is such a great product with such potential. 3 days after I first got the orb, it started spitting out disks at random. Even when the drive wasn't in use. Every time this happened, I restarted the computer, popped in the disk, and it worked fine.... Until one day when I just got a flashing red led on the front. I called up Castlewood tech, and they told me I have a bad drive. Turns out most MR drives ( Magneto something or other.. Zip Drives and SparQ drives use this technology ) have a 15% DOA rate, and a 30% failure rate. He told me to send the drive back, and they would ship me a new one. No problem, only it took a month. The drive I have now has worked well for a few weeks, but still spits out a disk every once in a while.
The tradeoff's are there. Great drive, but it breaks easy. I think it's worth it for me, but hey. Might not be the same for you.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
alexaugot
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Member: Alex Augot
Location: Cambridge Ma
Reviews written: 13
Trusted by: 26 members
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