Castlewood Orb

» see castlewood.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

in 1999 i was 15. my modem was 33.6k and my removable storage was a 700 megabyte cd-r blank that cost about a dollar at the local computer shop on tunalı. the orb was a 2.2 gigabyte removable hard disk cartridge from a company i had never heard of, sitting at a price tier my budget did not reach. i did not know anyone with one. the orb stayed sealed inside the american prosumer storage market.

castlewood systems formed in 1996 in pleasanton, california, with several engineers from syquest technology that had just begun the slide toward its 1998 bankruptcy. the orb shipped in 1999 with a 3.5 inch cartridge holding 2.2 gigabytes at hard drive speeds. list price near $200 for the drive and $30 for a cartridge. it was the iomega jaz competitor that should have arrived in 1996 and ended up arriving three years late. the same year iomega itself was already winding down jaz production.

syquest had been bought out of bankruptcy by iomega in 1999 and the new owner sued castlewood over patents the founders had used at the original company. the lawsuit went on for years and bled the company's cash. honestly. castlewood shipped a 5.7 gigabyte orb in 2001 hoping the larger capacity would create a real market. by then cd-r was at twenty cents a blank and the first external usb hard drives were under three hundred dollars. the math did not work and the lawsuit kept running. castlewood filed for chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2004 and the orb went out with the company.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it actually ended ~

the lawsuit was the visible problem (close enough). iomega had bought what was left of syquest in 1999 and immediately filed against castlewood claiming the orb cartridge used technology developed under syquest payroll. the founders disputed it. the case dragged through court for years and burned cash the company did not have. the storage market itself was the bigger problem. by 2002 a 40 gigabyte external usb drive was under $200 and a stack of cd-r blanks could hold a feature film. the orb was a 2.2 gigabyte drive that needed a proprietary cartridge per machine and a $30 cart for every project. that was the wrong direction to be heading.

~ what got buried with it ~

castlewood is the third storage company graveside in the same window as syquest and iomega-jaz, all chasing the same prosumer slot that disappeared once usb and cheap external drives took over. the orb itself is a competent piece of hardware that works fine on a windows 98 box if you find one in an estate sale today (no kidding). nothing reads the cartridge anymore unless you have the original drive. the founders went their separate ways after the chapter 7 closed. nobody tried this product category again at the consumer tier.

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