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Non-Tech : Iomega Thread without Iomega -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Alan Rosen who wrote (9329)	4/21/1999 12:26:00 PM
From: FruJu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10072

A user's experience with ORB from the www.xlr8yourmac.com site today... perhaps not all it's cROCKed up to be? ======= "We got an ORB drive at work for the IBMs and in the manual (for the IDE version) it states that it does work on Macintosh (G3s) through the "PC Exchange" control pannel. Upon testing, it does work (only on G3s of course) but does not mount like a ZIP drive does (every time you put in the disk) only before start up or when you click the "mount now" icon. It's not quite as fast as they boast. On both the IBMs and Macs we only were able to get it up to 1.2MB second avg. when the documentation states that it does 16.6MB per second peak with IDE and 20MB per second with SCSI. Perhaps we're doing something wrong, but our highest writing peak was no where near 16.6 (maybe as much as 2 or 3mb second peak.) Reading was a bit faster than writing. I think it's average read transfer rate was around 5-6MB second... I'm not quite sure on that though. The drive itself is kind of slow mechanically. When you insert a disk it takes a little longer than inserting an EZ drive disk into a Syquest EZ drive (about 15 - 20 seconds). When you "eject" the disk, it takes less time to spin down, however the drive's orange light flashes for about 15 seconds _after_ the disk has been ejected and a new disk cannot be used until the light stops. Remember that the ORB drive we got has the IDE interface, and because of this the documentation does not have any Macintosh support or information execpt for that one-liner "Macintosh is supported through PC Exchange." Apparently, in the future, there will be a ORB Formater that you can use to format disks. I know the SCSI version is not out yet, but I was told that the SCSI Orb drives "probably" use a IDE to SCSI converter right on the drive itself instead of a "real" SCSI interface. I don't know if this is true or not though. On a final note: We did not test the drive completely. We did a 600MB write and a 600MB read on the IBM and a 450MB write and a 450MB read on the Macintosh. Then a bunch of small reads and writes on both. No disk errors on either machines but, again, we were only seeing how and if they worked on the two machines. The IBM was a Pentium II 266mhz with 64mb ram. The drive was master and the only device on the IDE chain. The Mac was a G3 Tower Rev3. 300mhz. 32mb ram. The drive was master replacing the CD-ROM and ZIP drive. (I did this to make sure no other device slowed down it's performance.)