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Hardware

Ask Slashdot: ORB Drives, Anyone? 173

Posted by Cliff from the I-wish-I-had-one-of-these dept.
Chris Herborth asks: "Castlewood Systems is apparently shipping their ORB drive (you know, 2 gig removable cheaper than a 250MB ZIP drive, with media at $40) now to at least two US distributors (ASI) and (Wintec). So, has anyone seen one yet? How well does it work under non-Windows operating systems? I was going to invest in something useful for doing backups soon, but I'm afraid to just order one of these (shipping to/from Canada is a real pain in the butt) in case something goes wrong or it only works properly with Windows." Your thoughts, folks?
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Ask Slashdot: ORB Drives, Anyone? More

Ask Slashdot: ORB Drives, Anyone?

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  • You've got to be kidding! (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    You say it "ended up grinding off the cylinders on the far edge of the platter"?? I'd be very wary of recommending a device when you've already had one catastrophic failure in just over a month of light use.

    The ORB drives are supposed to use the same head and media technology as ordinary hard drives. So it isn't clear to me why they would have special spin-down requirements. This kind of failure would make me concerned about long term reliability.

  • Where does everyone get $40 for media? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Even on Castlewood's site it says $29.95 a disk.

    Unless I am confusing it with www.cdrexpress.com where I got mine for $29.95 each.
  • I have an EIDE ORB drive. It works well. I had some configuration troubles with it. Once it was solved, it works like I intended. Before the EIDE ORB drive, I had an all-SCSI system. I can switch between boot to SCSI or boot to IDE in the bios option menu. I have my regular computing stuff stored in the SCSI HD. When I needed to experiment with Linux, I just pop in the linux ORB disk, reboot, set to boot to IDE in bios, and off I go to linux land. =) Sure beats buying a new computer just to mess around with a new OS (I am a linux newby).

    I have a CD-R drive, and I plan on getting a DVD-RAM drive. For doing real-work, though, the OS/platform needs to be installed on the HD. ORB is the only thing that offer the speed with the usability of removable drives.

    I only encountered minor configuration problems with the drive so far. I run Windows NT 4.0 WS SP 4 on my SCSI setup, and I had to install ATAPI support to get the drive recognized. Another problem I dealt with is partitioning the orb media. I always thought using removable media is like using a floppy; just format it and pop it in the drive. Turns out you can partition the media like a hard drive. And most often you have to repartition the media if you want a bootable media.

    Now as soon as I get my hands on FreeBSD or BeOS, I'll be installing them on my computer. All that fun messing around with technology, and none of the risks. =)
  • ...are tape drives, BTW.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad

  • All I see are a bunch of questions about when the drive will be available :-). So far I haven't found any concrete discussion of problems with the drives.
  • I remember doing backups on tape. I remember wanting to get one small 15K file back from one of those tapes. I remember waiting over half an hour to get that file back. No thanks!
  • I have one here right now. I haven't had a chance to play with it under Linux yet (it's not actually mine), but I don't see any reason why it shouldn't work. This is an IDE version; the SCSI versions aren't available yet AFAIK. It's really nice and fast too; you usually can't even tell the difference between it and a regular hard drive.

    BTW, they should be available in Canada. I believe my dad ordered this one from a Canadian distributor, anyhow.

    Feel free to contact me if you want to know more :-).
  • You don't HAVE to use floppys. I havn't had a floppy drive in my computer for the last year; the only time the thing went in is when I thrashed my hard drives and replaced them (needed some boot media; the floppy was the only choice). I think the iMac is on the right track (if you don't have a floppy drive, you'll learn to live without it, and one day we can all live in peace and harmony sans stupid floppy disks.), but everyone makes fun of it for that. Some people... ;)

    As far as my floppyless boxes, they are all networked, and connected to the internet. All the computers I use that aren't at my house are internet connected, so I can just copy files down the wire; it beats splitting an mp3 into 5 floppys, carrying them around, drop one in the mud, find out another's little metal cover is loose and it gets stuck in your drive at work... You get my point.

    As for 5.25" floppys... good riddance. My 5.25" floppy drive puts off so much radiation that it can cook food that I have sitting on my desk when I use it. Still, it's the only link I have to the complete 30 floppy backup I made of my 40gb hard drive in 1992... (the only backup I've ever done; my tape drive has yet to work :)

    jason

  • Err... (Score:1)

    by iota ( 527 )
    Thats 40mb hard drive, not 40gb.

    7 years ago, media even 500mb was unfathomable...

    yeah. my little 386/16 w/4mb had 40gb...
  • http://slashdot.org/articles/99/01/27/0847220.shtm l
  • Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:

    Castlewood is reporting that the SCSI and USB versions will work with MacOS. If they'll work with MacOS & Windoze there shouldn't be *too* much of a problem getting one to work under Linux or BeOS.

    LK
  • Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:

    >>It's gotta be Canada taxing the bajeezez out of your orders, I (in the US) order stuff shipped via UPS from Japan all the time and see no 'brokerage fees'. Canada is struggling to keep its identity and does so by trying to make imports more expensive in order to encourage local production and consumption. If you're buying anime, though, like me, you're screwed.


    The Canadian government should die, those bacon eating bastards. You guys should revolt! Oh, wait a minute. You're not allowed to own guns(at least not easily). And you're not allowed to posess dangerous information. Ah well, fuck it. You're screwed.

    There's plenty of room to the south of you.

    LK
  • Posted by Macaw25:

    I'm tired of people gawking over removable media. My PC does not have (and will never have) a floppy drive, CD-ROM drive, Zip-Drive, Jaz-Drive, or JimBob's Super duper magneto-optical gizmo. My PC will allways have a fast, high band- width, low-latency network connection. Screw removable media.
  • Posted by Macaw25:

    One more thing. Does anybody else have a problem with moving parts on their PC? I sure do. My hard-drive is bad enough, but adding some other whirlygig doesn't make it better.
  • Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:

    "...if a tape breaks or loses data before the 30 years / 15,000 cycles is up you get a new one."

    Great! And if my wife dies, I can remarry...

    The problem here is that their cost is the cost of a tape which is, what, $50? Any given 20GB chunk of my data is going to be worth more than that.

    To be meaningful, a "lifetime guarantee" should:

    a) last a lifetime AND
    b) cover ALL losses
  • Posted by Macaw25:

    1. Go to web site that sells the software I am to buy.

    2. Purcahse software.

    3. Download software.

    4. Install software.

    Easy.
  • Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:

    >>Yeah, just like those guys who just shot up that school in Denver. Funny how that never happens in Canada. The US government should die, those hot-dog eating bastards. You guys should revolt! Oh, wait a minute. You're all allowed to own guns and would probably end up annihaliting each other. Ah well, fuck it. You're screwed.

    Shit happens. Sometimes bad shit happens for no good reason. Those kids also had pipe bombs, I guess it's a good thing that we made pipe bombs illegal huh? Oh, wait a minute people will still do illegal things if they want to? (Insert Sarchasm) If people would just follow the law we wouldn't have to make any more laws! (Remove)

    I and most other Americans would prefer to live with a greater threat of violence in our everyday lives than live as government subjects like out northern neighbors.

    >>There's plenty of room to the north of you.

    Trees, Snow, Bacon and Molson great points in the Canadian Travel Ministry's tourist manual.

    LK
  • Posted by FascDot Killed My Previous Use:

    Scientists discover new form of matter: DLTite. A lump of this substance remains 100% unchanged after exposure to the elements (including magnetism, extreme heat (the interior of a star), extreme cold (10 degrees below absolute zero), and the end of the universe (only tested once)).

    The only problem is, since it can't be modified, you can't make a backup onto it.
  • ...unless they or their web site say they actually have them, since this is a new product.
  • The ORB retail Parallel Port 2.2GB product will be
    available worldwide from many of the leading
    distribution, retail, VAR and mail order companies
    SOON!!.

    The ORB External SCSI 2.2GB for Mac and PC and USB
    (PC / Mac) drives will be available in the second
    quarter of 1999.

    The 2.2GB Firewire 1394 2.2GB will be
    shipping in the third quarter.
  • They have a few vendors that carry them at www.pricewatch.com [pricewatch.com] (go to Storage: Removable | ORB). My friend ordered one a little bit ago, yet I havent talked to him since, so maybe I'll get him to reply to this thread if the shipment has come in and he's had a chance to play with it.

    -----
    If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed...

  • Makes me wonder if Castlewood [castlewoodsystems.com] has read the federal guidelines regarding HTML [zdnet.com] yet `:-P

  • . . . so basically, in computer terms, that's forever.
  • or, put another way, I work for a tape backup software company, and I have only heard of one instance in my 7 years, of DLT media failing on it's own (not traceable back to a hardware failure), and that was a peice that apparently was defective out of the box.

    I definately can't say the same for DAT or 8mm.
  • Floppies are good for storing absolutely unalterable files: you can have a floppy with the write-protect tab open with md5sums for all your suid binaries and run a program that diffs them against the current md5sums.
    For serious data storage of course, they're crap.

    axolotl

  • SCSI (Score:1)

    by ChadG ( 1680 )
    Yes.
    I just got a computer catalog the other day (don't remember the company), and it had the SCSI, IDE, and USB versions in it.

    "In true sound..." -Agents of Good Root
  • They do make an external. I'm not sure what kind of interface it is using, but there is a picture of it in the catalog I got in the mail Saturday.

    "In true sound..." -Agents of Good Root

  • If you can afford a real backup device, like a DLT drive, 8mm drive, or 4mm drive, you should get one. With DLT, for $50 you get a tape that can hold 20gb uncompressed and is guaranteed to last forever. To fit that much data on orb disks would cost you $3,200 in media alone, and there's no guarantee on how long it will last.

  • 20 Gig / 2 Gig = 10 10 * $40 = $400 Do you use an Intel-brand Calculator, or something? ;-p

    I calculated my numbers based on $40 250mb removable media. Even for $40 2gb media, it's still $360 cheaper for a DLT tape.

  • Perhaps you should have a look at the data sheet for DLT drives and tapes. The data sheet [quantum.com] states that the tapes are good for at least 30 years and can be used for 15,000 backup/restore cycles involving up to 1,000,000 media passes. The data is additionally protected by reid-solomon encoding so that areas with small data loss or damage can be recovered. The media has a lifetime limited warranty -- if a tape breaks or loses data before the 30 years / 15,000 cycles is up you get a new one.

    Even though access speed isn't as much of an issue for backup devices, a DLT4000 drive is by no means slow. It can move up to 1.5mB/sec, and seek to any position on the tape in aproximately 60 seconds. Higher end DLT7000 drives are faster and can record more data (35gB) onto the same tape.

  • The 20 GB tape capacity you reported and the 2.0 GB capacity of the ORB disks means that 10 disks would be required. 10 disks at $40 per disk is $400 not the $3,200 you claimed.

    Whoops. Accidentally based my numbers on the 250mb removable media that was also discussed in the slashdot blurb. DLT4000 is still $360 cheaper than Orb as a backup medium. DLT7000 is even cheaper; it crams 35gb onto the same $50 tape.

    Also magnetic media, be it tape or disk, does not last forever. There is a reliable life span of about 10 years and it can be usable after that for many years. Have you ever watched a video tape recorded in 1983? Listed to a cassette from 1975? You will see what I mean, loss in quality due to degradation.

    This severe loss in sound/video quality is caused by two things: 1. the low quality of consumer grade cassettes, and 2. the nature of helical scan playback and recording devices, which wrap the tape through a complex path of capstains, pinch rollers and rotating heads. DLT has a straight tape path, and the only thing that touches the data side of the tape is a single, fixed head assembly.

    Remember, your backup data wont degrade - it will be unuseable. And everytime you use the tape more iron oxide comes off of the tape lowering it's lifespan...

    DLT tapes lose very few metal particulates during playback because the data side of the tape comes in contact only with the read/write head and nothing else. DLT is unlike an audio casette player, which squeezes the tape through rubber pinch rollers that touch both sides of the tape, or a VCR, which rubs the tape up agaist a rotating head. Also, the data on DLT tapes is protected by reid-solomon error correction which enables all but the most severely damaged tapes to be recovered.

    Because of careful design and testing, DLT tapes are specified to last more than 30 years with less than 5% demagnetization and 15,000 backup/restore cycles. Tapes are protected by a lifetime limited warranty and will be replaced if they fail before the rating. See the DLT Data Sheet [quantum.com] for details.

  • There is no spinning read/write head like with helical-scan tape systems, but DLT tape does contact its read/write head. Plus it goes around 6 rollers and winds up on a temporary spool while in use.

    The only thing the data side of the tape touches is the R/W heads. It's the back of the tape that touches the rollers and the takeup reel.

  • What ticks me off is they're advertising the compressed space, assuming a 2:1 compression ratio. The media is only 15GB
  • Water moisture...

    I work with plastic extrusion and might be aware of a few weaknesses of plastics. Plastics, especially nylon, absorb water quickly. Water can be our worst enemy if the stuff is not dehydrated before extrusion. After the product is made, water can degrade the plastic's strength over time. Weather resistant plastics are colored black to absorb sunlight. Fire and heat resistant plastics, are fortified with lead based compounds.

    Most of my old CDRs at home that are going bad due to the surface getting very weak and cracking. When they were new, the surface was much stronger. Now I only touch the sides and never the top surface.
  • Impressive, but I would not trust my ass to tape for 30 years.

    Yes, the math will prove 100% recovery if there is a 5% data loss in that sector . This is good for signal loss due to degradation, but what if there was some contamination in the room. Oily dust, moisture, prying fingers, perhaps? If there is a 5% data loss that is not uniformly distributed across the medium, the recovery will not hash out.

    If it does break within the warranty, I don't think a blank replacement tape would make me happy. I would not trust my tape for over one year.

  • I think I'll have to look into getting one!

    From their site, the list of supported Operating Systems include the obligatory winblows as well as Dos, OS/2, and Mac. No mention of Linux or BeOS.

  • Syed(?), monstro engineer & founder of Castlewood, left Syquest, which he also founded. After leaving one of the big HDD manufacturers (Seagate, I think).

    He seems to be the magic that made Syquest; the magic left with him and Syquest collapsed in on itself after staking its future on the Sparq. Which they totally screwed up. (Ask Iomega: you let MTBF drop AFTER the drive is established, not before!)

    So, the answer to your question seems to be, Castlewood is stable as long as Syed sticks around. Which should be about the lifetime of the drive and media-- about 2 years.

    Ask yourself, "Do I want to be able to read a disc five years hence?" If the answer is "yes", buy CD-R or DVD-RAM. CD-R drives are as cheap as Orb drives, and you can buy a lot of CD-Rs for the price of one Orb disc. And Linux supports it NOW.

    I ain't stakin' my data on some wild-goose-chase engineer, no matter how brilliant.

  • hehe. I can do Vinal, etc. I know a several people that can do the wax recordings. I know, the exception rather than the rule, and the wax recordings are what you call limited use. 100 years isn't a lot for good technology. There is also is a market for reproductions, audiophiles and collectors. Personal data, however, is a totally different matter. Computers have become a commodity item. When you are done with it throw it away and migrate you data to your new system or loose it for all time.
  • CD's are different from magnetic media. Also, the CD has been an audio standard for ~20 years and there still isn't a widely available (and cheap) standard to replace it (Mini-Disks compete more with Tapes than anything else and DVD's have a strike against them because video is listed in the title). They are only now getting to be more of a standard than a tape deck in cars. The CD-ROM drive is only now getting (slowly) replaced in computer systems by DVD-ROM drives, which are backwards compatable. I have yet to see software distributed on DVD (4GB is a lot of space to fill and DVD stamping costs are higher). CD's are legacy. However, Consumers don't ever want to have to throw away their music collections or software. You can still buy record players (at Best Buy yet) and probably will still be able to buy record players with relative ease for the next 10 to 20 years even though most people stopped buying records in the Mid-80's to early 90's. The Audiophiles out there prefer *gasp* analog! Oh, and next time you look at some of your older CD's see how many of them were actually recorded DDD. Not very many. 16bit 44.1khz sound is here to stay for awhile. Oh, and when it does change, I challenge you to tell the differance on 99.99% of the home stereo equiptment out there. I look at the THD, Signal-to-Noise and frequency response on most of the consumer audio products out there and I am shocked. "I picked up this kicking 200 Watt/Channel Front 100Watt/c Center 60 Watt/Channel w/ 4% THD, rear integrated tuner/preamp/amplifier/surroud proccessor with DSP effects and nifty flashing lights and these speakers with 15" ported woofer (and fequency response that has more holes than cheese grater), all for $1500 and boy does it thump."
  • We Americans will have Canada in our grasp soon enough....
    BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA
    ^a^

    (And then you won't have to pay extra for shipping. Next after Canada: Cuba. Then we retake the Canal Zone!)

    HOOHOOHOOHOOHOOHAHAHAHAHA

  • With all these different incompatible standards coming and going, I'll just stick to CD-RW. At least then I'll be sure anyone will be able to read the media. + blank CDs are dirt cheap.

    I sure hope DVD-RAM takes off - it's backwards compatible with DVD-ROM and all CD formats. It's a shame we still have to use 3.5" floppies!

  • Math (Score:1)

    by boinger ( 4618 )
    20 Gig / 2 Gig = 10 10 * $40 = $400 Do you use an Intel-brand Calculator, or something? ;-p

    "The Constitution admittedly has a few defects and blemishes, but it still seems a hell of a lot better than the system we have now."

  • Atic (Score:1)

    by bgue ( 4676 )
    Thanks for the warnings, guys. They're out of my bookmarks now.

    Brian
  • Shit, that didn't come out right....but I spent vacation pay from my crappy manual labour summer job buying a cd burner last summer, and I've used it quite lightly. Nonetheless, I've ended up with about 7 gigs of backup that I like to have accessible occasionally (such as one disk that's just a really really big hash table ) and another 10 gigs that is just for safekeeping, and I think I'd be pretty hard pressed to find a network connection to something that would store that much for me reliably.

    Plus I end up with some boffo coasters.

    -Brian
  • Yeah, that could get a pile of fixed disk, but it's a lot scarier to mail a HD to someone compared to a $2 CD.

  • Oh, of course, I forgot about those 640 GB boot proms that get their data off of the CD by osmosis and include a fully functional version of [insert OS here].

    End result is, there's got t o be a drive somewhere, unless the troll doesn't install any software. And what with moving parts bothering them so much, they prolly don't play games either, cause joysticks are [ack] analog!

  • If there's an analog audio tape format that doesn't use a driven metal capstan and a freewheeling rubber (or fiber) pinch roller with the tape squeezed between them it's certainly the exception rather than the rule, as maintaining the proper tension and speed with just the supply and take-up reel motors would be a lot more complex and expensive, and a magnetic tape format that works without the tape rubbing the head as it moves past it would be even less likely. Tape acts on the the tape path as a kind of very fine grit sandpaper and just like sandpaper what it wears out wears it out as well, so tape sheds oxide; unavoidable fact of life.

  • And as I've pointed out elswhere, if you leave 2 or more in a drawer somewhere, they breed like coathangers.

  • As I recall, the phonograph record cleaning product Discwasher was an outgrowth of the discovery that some sort of microscopic organisms were eating their way into vinyl blood bags and contaminating the blood. The resemblance between Discwasher fluid and soaking solution for hard contact lenses wasn't entirely co-incidental.

  • "Forever" is quite a long time. I thought that the time you could be sure properly stored tapes would good for is around 20 years.
    However, I agree that decent scsi tape drives are a good method for periodic backups. They're just not good for permanant archiving.
  • I am waiting untill they make an external with both a parrallel and scsi port in it.

    Monchi
  • I got a letter from Castlewood last week and it looks like at least for Internal SCSI, it will be another 1 to 2 months! They then tried to push an EIDE drive on me. Geesh! EIDE can Byte Me. :)

    Will still buy the ORB Though!

    [Hey Andrew, get with the programme and buy one with me!] :)

  • The Apple ][ drives were pretty low density as well. I heard rumors that you could format and get at least 70K of usable space on the cardboard spacer that they put in the drive when they ship it.

    --Joe

    --

  • I've had one for a month (Score:3)

    by Fone626 ( 6793 ) on Monday April 19, 1999 @04:37PM (#1926404)
    I got the EIDE version a little over a month ago. It installs into a linux machine flawlessly.
    The only problem that I had was couple weeks after I got the drive I heard a grinding noise. Turned out that linux never spun the drive down even once in that first 2 weeks and I never used it, so it ended up grinding off the cylinders off the far edge of the platter. I promptly exchanged it and set a spindown with hdparm and its been working beautifully ever since.

    I would definatly recommend this drive, just make sure that you either use the drive a lot or get it to spin down.
    Seems like the drive should move the head around all by itself to avoid damage like what happened to me though.
  • um!?

    Is that DOCUMENTED?

    What sort of horrible design defect would allow a drive to GRIND OFF part of its media? Regardless of how long its been spinning?

    ORB heads contact the platter?

    Am I the only one who is astonished by this?
  • Tape last for ever tell that to nasa.

    A friend of mine works for NASAs storage facility. They loose about 1 tb each year. Tapes last about 4 years it takes 5 years to convert from 1 tape set to the next + the new data. So nasa looses 1 year of data for every year gained becuas of "everlasting" tape backups!
  • USB is limited to 12 megabits/sec.... this thing is 12 MEGABYTES/sec

  • I have one (Score:4)

    by adraken ( 8869 ) on Monday April 19, 1999 @04:15PM (#1926408)
    Well I'd like to add to the discussion as saying that I DO have one of these drives, and I must say that they are wonderful. I bought an Internal EIDE one and it came with a "Tools" disk. It is almost full. (In win95) However, the only thing important on there is the "ORB Tools" (which is approximately 3mb). Everything else are program demos and videos. I promptly used the ORB Tools to change the status of the drive from "Removable" to "Non-removable". Then I used Partition Magic 4.0 to remove the current FAT16 partition with a ext2fs partition and rebooted into Linux. (cfdisk can be used also if you wish) I just mounted /dev/hdb1 and it worked perfectly. The only caveat that I have is that they have no support for Linux/UNIX whatso ever. However, considering the community, it's not necessary. Also, an initial (recommended) defect scan revealed only 43 bad sectors out of a couple billion (IIRC) (nice margin of error). One would expect 0 bad sectors on a traditional hard drive, however, one must remember that these are portable disks, and are much more suseptible [sic!] to damage, et cetera. I bought it because of the price/performance. The price is incredible. $180 (on Wintec) for the drive, and $30 per disk! (U.S.) These prices are incredible. Compared with a Jaz 2GB, these drive are dirt cheap. I have not benchmarked the read/write performance, but I plan on trying HD Tach to benchmark this. (I do not have a registered version, so I cannot test writing.) Performance is virtually indistinguishable from my 3.2gb hard drive. I regularly download large amounts of GNOME sources and compile them on the ORB drive, they compile at regular speeds. I also keep my MP3s and the Star Wars trailers on there. (no slow down or stuttering, also no data loss experienced). Another nice feature of the ORB drive is that the drive fits in a 3.5" drive bay. Also, the disks themselves are SLIGHTLY smaller than Zip disks. If you are really worried about unreliability, the disks are warranteed for 1 year.


    All in all, I would highly recommend this drive for everyone, although I would like to see some numbers regarding percentage of failure, but beyond the initial bad 43 sectors (I bought this around the middle of March), no new bad sectors have come up.

  • you paid $20 for shipping to UPS, and then another $25 to a broker who files all the paperwork and obtains all the permits for the trucks.

    i have no idea whether UPS has brokers on their payroll, or if they just contract with independant brokers. with as much shipping as UPS must be doing across the border, i find it hard to believe that they don't have them on the payroll...but who knows.
  • Are they actually in stock ? beware: a lot of vendors are in the business of selling things that they don't have in stock , and will not have in stock for some time. This means your credit card will be billed for an item that takes forever to ship.

    Be careful to purchase from a vendor who can provide real time availability info. Oh, and check www.resellerratings.com if you don't know the company's reputation.

  • Indeed, I've had numerous problems with DATs. Believe it or not, in lieu of springing for DLT or AIC, I lean toward Travan right now. Since I stopped buying crappy media (I only use Imation cartridges now) I have yet to have a single restore failure, and I've got tapes that were recorded 10 years ago (admittedly not Travan, but they fit in my Travan drive) that I can still restore just fine.
    Of course, insist on the SCSI versions of these drives.

    I'm trying out an Aiwa if it comes in today; $230 for 4/8GB, hardware compression, and read-while-write verify. Less that $100 if you don't get these two features. The 10/20GB unit is only another $50, but I didn't want to trash all my old tapes (TR5 drive can't write TR4 media)
  • Well lookie there - I just bought one! :) Wonder when it will show up here hehe!
  • I may be confused here as well, so feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but I think the previous post is confusing the media attributes with the data format.

    First, the media limitations. CDRW disks have a lower reflectivity then CDR disks, therefore most older drives cannot read them, but some can. Also, I have seen some CDRW disks advertised (have not tried them) that seem to imply that they are CDRW, but have sufficient reflectivity to be read in all legacy drives.

    The second issue is the format you write the data to the disk in. You can create an ISO9660 image on CDR or CDRW disks, no problem. You can create a Packet Read (via Adaptec DirectCD) on CDR or CDRW no problem. Heck, you can even create an ext2fs image on either type of disk. You just need the right software to be able to mount them and read them back. Unfortunately for Linux, there is no way to mount, read and write the Adaptec created disks right now.

    Again, I may be confused (there is a lot of subtle technical issues with these things), so feel free to correct me if I get it wrong.
  • A friend of mine works for NASAs storage facility. They loose about 1 tb each year. Tapes last about 4 years it takes 5 years to convert from 1 tape set to the next + the new data. So nasa looses 1 year of data for every year gained becuas of "everlasting" tape backups!


    I vaguely remember hearing about this. Not to detract from your (valid) point, but what this says to me is that NASA should buy more tape copying equipment so that its rate of copying can keep up with the amount of copying that it needs to do.


    If you want data to be stored forever, you could probably do it by setting up the network equivalent of a RAID, with data being duplicated on all machines. As old machines died or were removed, new machines would be added, ad infinitum.


    Now, for terabytes of data, this would get a bit pricey, but it would certainly be effective for smaler amounts of data and might be worth it even for larger.

  • Exactly what I was going to ask. My mouth watered when the ORB drive news came down the pipe, but DVD-RAM is available NOW for ~$500. Do I have a drive? Hell no, I don't have $500 do spend on any one thing ('cept my car). But the thing about DVD-RAM is that the standard should be backwards compatible for the next 5 years at least; every new DVD-RAM drive that comes out, even if it has more advanced features etc. will still have the ability to at least read the first/second generation discs in their firmware. So by that rational, if I get a new 'puter with a DVD-RAM drive on it, I don't have to have it networked with the box with an ORB drive on it to get at the files.

    Having said that, I still might buy an ORB if they crank the SCSI drive out anytime soon. 2 gig for $30-$40 is just too mouth-watering. I would probably regret it after a year or so though...I have upwards of 50 zip disks just sitting around collecting dust and the occasional MP3 album because 100 mb used to be the right size, and now just doesn't always cut it.

  • They may not have pinch-rollers, but the tape path
    is _anything_but_straight!_ In trying to debug
    some problems with a DLT drive at work, I pulled
    the lid (Quantum DLT4000) and watched the tape
    being drawn through... if that's straight, one of
    us is living in an alternate universe!

    Oh, and there _is_ contact with the head, or it
    wouldn't work. The bernoulli effect does not apply
    to something that can (and does) stop and change
    direction on a very frequent basis.
  • Would it ever make sense to have a "nearline" storage drive that was a combination of, say, a DLT drive and a an 8GB hard disk as "buffer"? Call it HSM-in-a-box. Tape catalogs could be stored on the HD as well as on the tape, along with frequently accessed files. To the OS, it would appear as a random access device, albeit a low-bandwidth one.

    It seems that whenever I archive stuff (zips at home, DLT at work), I usually retrieve about 10-20% of the stuff repeatedly, and the rest never or only once. The above scheme would allow near-instantaneous access (via on-HD catalog and buffering) of frequently accessed files. The HD space could also be used to defragment the tape if files were removed and new ones added.

    Perhaps such a system would work even better if you managed to combine an Orb cart with a DLT cart; keep the fixed disk with the tape. I think Sony's 8mm format does something along these lines by including some amount of flash storage in the tape cart itself, allowing the catalog to be accessable without a tape read and presumably data on the tape being seekable without having to scan as much on the tape.

    I know that there are HSM 'systems' out there, but the ones I've seen are usually gruesome OS tack-ons that rely on the standard filesystem and a tape or MO drive. Having an all-in-one box with firmware controlling the HSM management would make it more reliable and more OS-independent.

    (No, I don't know how you'd mke2fs or fsck this kind of a filesystem, but it seems like an interesting archival storage system).

    -shawn
  • The big mistake in backup, especially with large systems, is to scale up the backup to meet the total size of the system being backed up. This is because people seem to believe that image or total backups are just keen.

    What you end up doing is backing up 90% of the same data over and over again. All this does is cause hard drives to fail faster and tape heads to wear out sooner.

    A better approach is to build a two-level backup scheme where "system" backups (of system stuff, non-changing libraries, data archives, etc.) are done only occasionally (weekly or monthly), and daily or more frequent backups are done of changin data only.

    -------
  • Dear Larry Ellison,

    Get yourself a solid state HD and be happy.
  • What I want to know is how financially stable is Castlewood Systems -- are they publically traded, how long have they been in business, etc. If you think I'm making reference to the whole Syquest fiasco, you're right -- I wouldn't want to buy one of these drives only to find out six months from now that the company's gone out of business.
  • Why would you need a boot prom that big? All it needs to do is send the BOOTP request to a network machine that has a HDD with a BOOTP server and the OS you want to boot for install. The very first machine you set up needs a floppy or CD to boot from, but once you're past that you can get by withoutany removable media anywhere in your network. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but it depends on the system. Heck, with some BIOSes you don't even need a boot prom - just set it to "Boot from LAN first." It's actually pretty nice not to have any noisy HDDs/CDs/floppies on the machine in your bedroom - just the noise from the PS and monitor.
  • No Linux drivers yet, but those 30-50 Gb tape backups from OnStream [onstream.com] look like they could be the ticket. Cheap, too.

  • sounds like 2 NT problems to me.

    Microsuck.
  • **if** what you were using the removable media for was backup. You cant:

    mkisofs -a -r /dev/tape | cdrecord

    :)

  • ORB experiences & mailing list (Score:3)

    by Chmarr ( 18662 ) on Monday April 19, 1999 @06:24PM (#1926426)
    For those that are interested, there's an ORB mailing list for linux users: linuxorb@tatoosh.com

    Send an empty message to linuxorb-subscribe@tatoosh.com [mailto] to subscribe.

    There's also a web page at www.tatoosh.com/linuxorb/ [tatoosh.com]

    I purchased two orb drives, and one extra disk (total of three disks). The extra disk I purchased had a sector error, but the drive supports sector remapping, so zeroing the disk will fix those problems. I returned the disk since it was only a week old. This seems to be a common problem; 3 of the 9 disks I know about have had some sort of problem; hopefully their quality control will improve over time.

    The drives dont have excellent linux support. YOU need windows to switch the drive from fixed to removable (or you're going to have problems treating them as removable disks). Also, they dont use a standard 'eject' IOCTL. Apparently, Castlewood are releasing the OEM manual so linux support can be written for these things.

    Apart from those shortcomings, I think the drives are great. The media is convenient, and cheap (although signifigantly pricier here in Australia). The access time is noticably slower than a hard-drive, but the sustained throughput rate is excellent. (ie, I can dd if=/dev/orb very quick, but cp -axv of lots of little files is a tad slower than I'd like).

    A warning, though. The place in the US I got it from was having troubles getting the media. So.. buy a few extras if they're available.

  • I saw on ZDTV (The ScreenSavers) that they like the drive alot, so I would guess it's fairly reliable. I emailed Castlewood's tech support about Linux compatibility. The drive has two modes: removable and fixed. In fixed mode, it acts just like a regular hard-drive, and currently that's the only way it works under Linux. I don't know if you'd need to remount to get to another disk, or completely reboot (which, of course, would Suck(TM)). Tranfer rates are /much/ better than almost any removable drives (12.2 MB/s avg, 16.6 MB/s peak). Also, a quip to the stated story, I've seen the standard price of ORB disks as $30 plus shipping, not $40 as previously stated. Overall, this thing sounds pretty snazzy to me, I think I'll be getting myself one when I get my tax return back.
  • If I want to "expand my horizons" I can tune into a Seattle station with the flick of finger.

    Note that I don't as a general rule. Canadian music is as much of a mix of good and bad as "international" music is, and some increadible bands just don't get airtime outside the border (Tragically Hip anyone?), not to mention the proliferation of quality local bands that are encouraged by the CanCon laws. The virtue of the Vancouver music scene, in particular, is that it's what Seattle was before the Big Record Labels discovered it. That, and, in Canada, no "[US Company] of Canada" can force out the Canadian content by buying up all the stations.

  • I'm one of the idiots who bought a Sparc. I'd have to be even more stupid to risk it again on yet another "wonder" drive. Good old DAT tape works fine for me.

    You obviously haven't worked anywhere where backups are vital.
    According to one Digital tech I talked to/worked with, Digital would not have anything to with anything that wasn't backed up onto DLT.

    The same tech could tell you countless stories of where DAT's had failed with all kinds of `amusing' consequences. Icluding one where the data was backed up twice on two different DAT's and both failed.

    Although I would trust DAT over any cartridge type system any day of the week. I guess the moral of the story is, if it's really important back it up two different places, at least.

    KillRaven

  • Vancouver is still too far away from Toronto... better yet, does anyone know of stores selling this beauty, preferrably SCSI version?
  • ... for those who actually *have* that port on their computer...

    Now I wonder if they're going to make a infrared version after that...

  • for those that actually have an orb drive, how does it work as a standalone drive? what i'd like to do is use it (on a personal pc) as the primary drive for linux. switch disks and boot into NT. switch disks and boot into beos. switch disks...
    any comments? sure, i'll pay a bit more, but i'll have each os completely separate. i could use my hard disk as a plain fat16 drive that could be seen from just about any of the OS's...
  • EEEK! heck, for that money now, you could get a decently hefty hard disk... consider my situation, with 24 gigs of storage at home (that's only counting one server) it makes things really nice....
  • I've seen ads for some tape drives lately that hold 30Gb on a $30 tape. The drives only cost $299.

    Does anyone have experience with these drives too?

    -nate
  • Where did the troll say s/he installed any software? 8-)
  • Thanks for your overview. I have a question though. When you say the disks are warranteed for a year, is that for the cost of the disk, or the cost of the data on the disk? I can't imagine a company providing reimbursement for lost data, but any other warranty is pretty useless since the disks cost next to nothing.
  • Actually it is UPS that tacks on the brokerage fee to any order coming into Canada.. I don't know what UPS US charges to get anything across the border but UPS Canada, takes the screwem' at the border approch and tacks on a $25 to $35 brockage fee. You then get to pay the goverment there 7%, but that is not part of the fee..

    The only way to ship to Canada from the US is (say it with me know) FEDEX, it actually arrives in one piece and I have never been charged a brokerage fee.

    And yes the CRTC requires 35% canadian content for Radio stations to retain their lic... and yes most Canadians think it's stupid too... but like anything goverment, you stand a better chance to being abducted by aliens then getting rid to the useless tits.
  • hey!
    what do you have against canada??
    shipping from the states is a real pain in the butt for some of us....
  • Please post an URL of that guarantee. Permanent storage of digital media (by conventional means) is currently impossible. Infact it's a HUGE problem, because it means that data archives constantly have to be moved and upgraded.

    If these people really claim that their tapes last forever their going to end up having their asses sued back to the stone age.

    BTW - ORB is RANDOM ACCESS, a tape system doesn't compete.
  • I'm a little skeptical that even optical can last that long. If they can it would only be under perfect conditions (controled atmosphere and temperature). There are just so many things that can go wrong, for instance:
    1. mold that eats plastic
    2. plastic that shatters from dryness or temperature changes
    3. chemical reaction between plastic and envirnmental factors (paint, etc)
    4. chemical reactions amongst between the CD's internal components.
    5. chemical reactions between the CD's internal components and construction-time contaminants.
    100 years is a lot of time, plus of course anyone can make such a guarantee because they won't be around to take the consequences. The tech industry simply has no appreciation or respect for significant time (Y2K anyone).
  • : Perhaps you should have a look at the data sheet
    : for DLT drives and tapes.

    Perhaps you should have a look at reality.

    30 year lifespan with 5% failure != lasts forever.
  • I'm in Australia, and the boss just bought one (from an Australian distributor). We wanted SCSI, but we ended up getting EIDE. (They said 2 weeks on SCSI). If we have any major drama in the next few hours, will let you know. *grin*
  • Brokerage fees occur when ordering any foreign goods, be it from Japan to the US, or the US to Canada. It depends on what's being shipped though (under various treaties/laws, some items may/will be exempt) Brokerage fees are fees charged at the border by a broker to prepare all the neccessary legal documents to import the goods legally under the various laws of the destination country (Such as the Excise Tax Act in Canada)
    Note however that UPS will charge brokerage fees for Ground Shipments. If you ship UPS ABW (Airborne Express Worldwide, or 2nd Day), you won't be charged. On the other hand, if you ship via a DECENT carrier (Purolator comes to mind.) you'll never be charged brokerage fees (these companies will either absorb the cost, or have some sort of arrangement with affiliates in the receiving/originating country)
    Of course, you'll still be charged your 7% Goods and Services tax, which is to be expected.
    Under NAFTA, most brokerage fees are being phased out between the participating countries.
    Notice that Software and intellectual material (books) are duty-exempt, and used items (have the shipper mark the package "Used Goods") are GST-exempt.


    As for some of the quasi-anti-Candian remarks in the post: Well, at least we can distribute nearly any level of crypto we want to international parties. And what's this I hear about an RSA patent? Not up here.
    As for those inconvenient content laws: What do you expect from a Socialist Country? At least I can go to the hospital without being charged...
    Granted if I lived in the States I'd be making 10X what I do here, after taxes. Hmmm. On that note, maybee I'll move to California for a couple of years :)


    Now, on to the ORB topic (I almost forgot...):
    Does anyone know of any Ontario distributors?
    And what about specs on noise output, and resistance to gravatational shocks, and rapid temperature changes (withing the operating parameters)?
  • I ordered a SCSI external back in March when they said they were going to ship April 15. The new date is May 1.
  • Well not forever, but proberbly longer than the drive will.

    We had some PDP-11 masbus Removable drives (1/4 tonne jobs the size of a washing machine, based on floppy disk technology with a ~40Mb capacity) here, the drives were fscked and just black smoked when pluged in, but we had loads of viable diskpacks left
  • Ok, now lets see. You've shelled out for the DLT drive at ~$2000, and you've got your tapes at $50 a time.

    Are you really seriously not then taking at least 2 backups of your data (one in the fire proof safe, one safely off site in a fire proof safe)?

    Even if all copys of the tapes are damaged by a duff drive, you can have the data recovered by one of the data recovery outfits around.
  • Lets see... No floppy, CD-ROM drive, Zip, etc, etc...

    The software has to come from somewhere, right? Unless you got the machine pre-installed with Win95 or Linux, and then used the internet to download the programs.

    I guess you don't ever plan to install any other operating system (floppy boot disk usually, but not always, required).

    And if you say, "I install it over the LAN", then the machine you are installing it from probably has removable media, right?

    My point is, all software has to come from somewhere and not all of it can be handled over the network.

    -- UOZaphod
  • Well, it ought to! The 1541 had what may be the lowest data density of any magnetic media ever in widespread use. I don't think I'd be surprised if someone told me you could read it by hand with some of that magnetic visibility fluid...
  • True, but I have to go buy a gun and shoot my self in the head right away...Cause I couldn't stand being an american =)


    peace.
  • Last time I checked...I was a Canadian =)

    And I can't remember the last time I heard a American say he was an american because he lived in north america..Can you?

    genius?

    and remember..dont feed the trolls.
  • I guess that my favorite radio station should ahve been bought out long ago then, since they refuse to play the top whatever % of music. So I guess they've just lucked out, huh?

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