Talk:Castlewood Orb Drive

Rewrite
Need complete rewrite. This entry has no flow. It's just a series of short sentences and tech specs. How about some history of the product? Why did it fail? --72.202.150.92 05:52, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

More context needed.
A spew of tech specs are meaningless, IMHO. I'd like to hear more of a historical context of why this product was introduced and why it failed. Personally, I seem to remember it being launched after the Jaz drive already was on the decline, so why was it released? --70.167.58.6 (talk) 23:18, 14 April 2008 (UTC)

Computer History Museum has an interview with Syed Iftikar that provides some of the reasons behind the Orb drive. The intention was to provide disks that could be easily used for DVRs with one disk for every two hours recorded. The proximate cause of failure is claimed to be related to a flaw in the production line that kept about 10% of drives from properly curing; as the glue continued to dry, it would coat disk and drive heads and eventually prevent operation. Pages 60-64 of the PDF format of the interview cover the Orb drive. I probably should find my user info and edit the article to show this. ```` —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.234.97.185 (talk) 05:21, 11 November 2008 (UTC)

External links modified
Hello fellow Wikipedians,

I have just added archive links to 1 one external link on Castlewood Orb Drive. Please take a moment to review my edit. If necessary, add after the link to keep me from modifying it. Alternatively, you can add to keep me off the page altogether. I made the following changes:
 * Added archive https://web.archive.org/20050217151301/http://www.datasure.com:80/orbspec.html to http://www.datasure.com/orbspec.html

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Cheers.—cyberbot II  Talk to my owner :Online 05:57, 18 February 2016 (UTC)

More about Orbs history
I could write some sentences about Cast. Orbs, but it would be based on old rememberings, witch wouldn't fit Wikipedia rules about sourcing. Around 2001 I had downloaded a promotional video on Castlewood Website, using YOU'RE SIMPLY THE BEST as song while Orbs was said to be used on AV editing tasks on computers, showing that it was the main use case promoted by the brand, following what Syquest apparently did. I don't know if I still have it somewhere on a readable disk. Perhaps that people like "the 8-bit guy" have some things?

About the lack of success: in my own experience, the first problem was, in france, that the product was boycotted by medias. In 1998 I was desperately searching for a replacement for floppy disks offering characteristics like Orb was offering... but I never read any review of the product in any computer magazine during all product short life. Not even a mention(perhaps only one in an Apple-related one, at a time when the product was dead already!). So, how people would have any idea about buying one? As you may guess after what I wrote, LS-120 and Iomega Zip didn't answer my needs, Jaz was too expensive and revealed to have bad reputation regarding reliability, among others problems. EZdrive was already dead if I remember well (and MOs, that are finally the ones I'm still using more than 20 years after my first bought of an Orb, was almost never mentioned in computer press neither, but that's another story). I finally discovered Orb around 2001, I don't remember exactly how, probably somewhere on some Apple-related Website or mailing list. But then, only half of the path was made, because finding a shop selling them was a nightmare. Even Castlewood wasn't able to give me an actualized list of revendors. I finally found only one doing it in france(inMac in Paris), probably thanks to an advertisement in an Apple-related magazine, somewhere near the end of 2001. I then wrote a review on my personal Website(in french of course), now disappeared but an old snapshot is findable via archive.org, sadly without pictures(but an older one has got some of them), in the style of the "linux journal" one linked in the WP article, but far more complete. But since I'm not a journalist, searcher(at least officially) or something like this, it can't be used for WP anyway...

--80.67.176.85 (talk) 00:55, 21 November 2021 (UTC)