A
removable mass storage device, similar to a
zip or
jaz drive, made by
Castlewood. An Orb drive comes in
SCSI,
EIDE,
parallel,
USB or
FireWire, using 3.5" disks capable of storing 2.2GB, using
magneto-optical technology. The major advantage of an Orb over, say, a Jaz drive, is the speed. An Orb has a
sustained transfer rate of 12.2MB per second, compared to the Jaz drive's 8.7MB per second. An Orb drive is also much cheaper than a Jaz drive, and the media is about a quarter the cost of a Jaz drive.
Note that using a parallel port drive (of any sort) is much, much slower than using an IDE or SCSI version of the same drive.