dbminter Posted August 26, 2013 Posted August 26, 2013 Went through a closet of stuff to free up some storage space and came across some ancient PC tech junk I'd stored away. One of it was even in its original box. It freed some space getting rid of it. The first item, the one in its box, was an HP CD rewriter. The label on it said it was manufactured in May 2001. Its maximum CD-R write rate was 16x. As one would expect from a 2001 PC internal 5.25" drive, it connects by PATA and the old style power supply. I still have a 32 bit PC from 2009 that had 1 PATA connection on the mobo, but, it's already occupied by a much better, newer rewritable DVD drive. The other item was the much more interesting piece of PC tech history. A small footnote that deserves its place in the forgotten realms. The Castlewood Orb drive. The Orb was a 2001 2.2 GB external storage cartridge based HD drive. It connected by external SCSI. However, it was a piece of junk. The failure rate of disks was even higher than IOMega's Jaz 2, and its high rate of failure was why I tried replacing it with the Orb! Plus, if you had your dial-up modem connected, whenever the drive wrote to a disk, after the write operation, the modem would ALWAYS time out and disconnect! Needless to say, I retired this drive and the disks to the closet in a matter of months. I still had 2 dead disks, 1 disk that was labeled so its contents weren't desirable. The other 2 disks weren't labeled, but, since I don't know where I put that SCSI card I had when I got the Jaz drive, and I don't even know if it still works in modern PC's/Windows 7's library of 64 bit drives, I couldn't check the contents. So, I threw those away. The CD drive still has SOME use, albeit probably $10 worth of use. It's like new but PC's no longer support the technology required to operate it. So, I donated it to a local thrift store, the St. Vincent De Paul Store. I also am donating the Orb drive itself, even though it's only got about $10 worth of value, too, plus it probably doesn't work on modern PC's. Plus, the technology was piss poor to begin with. And, without discs, it's relatively worthless. But, without knowing what contents were on the other 2 disks to erase, I couldn't donate the disks with the drive, and so that's why I threw them away. I mean, I'm not getting any use out of the drive and I'm not getting any value for donating it, so, I might as well donate it. Who knows? Maybe someone out there with an old computer with SCSI who has some old Orb disks but not a working drive might find it. Yeah, right.
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