While reorganizing the shelving unit next to my computer, I came across my old Castlewood ORB Drive. For those of you not familiar with the name, it was an interesting magnetic data storage system that came out in 1999, the era of the ever-growing Zip and Jaz drives. It's a SCSI external drive, though my particualar model came with a USB adapater.

It used disks somewhat thicker and larger than a standard 3.5" floppy and inside they held a fairly sturdy shiny metal disc, rather than the thin flimsy material of a floppy drive. Each disk could hold 2.2 GB, which was a lot of storage in a portable drive back before DVD burners (or even CD burners) were so cheap and widespread. I got it mainly for data backups, naturally.

One downside were that the drive wasn't particularly fast; probably faster than a floppy but of course slower than a hard drive. The big problem I encountered was reliability. Too often the drive would get stuck in busy mode after writing and it would not recover. It was never clear if it had successfully finished writing all of the data or not and after resetting manually by toggling the power switch, you'd usually have to rewrite the files all over again to make sure they took. I think they came out with a firmware update which I never got around to applying.

After finding this legacy piece of tech, I decided to clear off the disks (I had two) and put the whole kit aside for selling at a later date. So I put in the driver disk and hooked in the USB cable. At this time, I discovered that the drivers will not install on Windows XP. A brief search around the internet revealed that no XP drivers were ever released by the company before they went out of business. A dead technology with no modern support means basically zero market, so I tossed the drive and disks after opening them to physically destroy any data that might be on them; the disks themselves are very cool thick metal polished to a flawless mirror-like surface. It's a shame, really. I'm very rarely an early adopter and this tech seemed so promising. Now it's dead and my money went to waste.