2.2 GB Portable Discs: Castlewood's ORB Drive

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External USB Or Internal IDE - Or SCSI?

An external drive can be operated with several computers at different locations. In particular, USB interfaces can be found on almost all motherboards produced over the last few years. Most Notebooks also feature USB connectors, making data change amongst different computers easier than ever before. After attaching the drive, the OS will prompt you to install the driver. As soon as this is done, you may instantly use your Orb drive. Microsoft included USB support with Windows 98. Users of Windows 95 OSR 2.0 or 2.1 will need the USB supplement kit (usbsupp.exe).

The case of Castlewood's Orb drive is green, so everybody will take notice of this drive on your desk. Unfortunately, we got a USB Orb with an alien power supply, which could not be used in our German lab. Due to this, we could not check its performance. According to our experience, 1 MB/s should be a realistic number.

The internal version is gray like other computer devices. As you can imagine, its installation is neither difficult nor exciting. One jumper is used to set the drive up as master, another will have it run as slave.

We did not have the SCSI models for testing. You can expect similar results as the IDE model, since the interface is not the limiting factor.

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Patrick Schmid was the editor-in-chief for Tom's Hardware from 2005 to 2006. He wrote numerous articles on a wide range of hardware topics, including storage, CPUs, and system builds.