Orb Drive
Removable Media - Orb Drive
The Orb Drive is a 3.5″ removable hard disk drive introduced by Castlewood Systems in 1999. The drive had an original capacity of 2.2 GB. A higher capacity version was introduced in 2001, with a capacity of 5.7 GB.
Orb 2.2 GB drives offered more capacity than its main rival, Jaz 2 GB drives from Iomega. They were faster and more reliable too. Like Jaz drives, Orb Drives were designed for data backup and exchange. They were capable of moving large office applications files, presentations, and digital contents including video.
Orb drives are available in different configurations such as internal (EIDE, SCSI) and external (Parallel, SCSI, USB, IEEE 1394 Firewire). They are also available for both PC and Macintosh computers.
Important Specifications of 2.2 GB Drive
- Average Seek Time: 10ms read/12 ms write
- Data Transfer Rate: 12.2 MB/s maximum
- Burst Transfer Rate: 20 MB/s maximum
- Rotation Speed: 5400 rpm
- Head: MR (Magneto-Resistive)
- CPU: 25 MIPS DSP
- Interface: 50-pin High Density narrow
- Disk Storage capacity: 2.2 GB
- Operating System Compatibility: Windows 98, 95, 3.1x, NT4.0+, MS-DOS 5.0+, OS/2 4.0, Mac OS 7.5.5+
Important Specifications of 5.7 GB Drive
- Transfer Rate: 17.35 MB/s sustained, 66 MB/s burst
- Average Seek Time: 11 ms read / 12 ms write
- Rotation Speed: 5400 rpm
- Drive Head: GMR (Giant Magneto-Resistive)
- CPU: 30 MIPS DSP
- Operating System Compatibility: Windows 98, Windows 98SE, Windows NT 4.0 (SP4+), Windows 2000, Windows ME, Mac OS 8.6+
- The 5.7 GB drive can also read the 2.2 GB cartridges.
Orb Drives were widely known for their backup functionality. They surpassed the popular Zip drives in this regard. They have relatively large storage capacity even by today’s standards.
