ROBO5.8 wrote:
Hi Thom, I don't know where you can find Orbis drives. But if they are the
original style single sided drives then you can also look for Remex 8"
drives. Remex manufactured paper tape readers and punches and then branched
out into Floppy drives. They purchased units from Orbis and relabled them at
the time.
ROBO
Remex also made a series of drives using a plastic base casting. It was a
legendary cost reduction and ensured that nobody else would make that same
mistake again. The casting would shift enough in normal use to give
constant read and write errors. It was a loser then and I doubt it has
improved. In my opinion, using Remex with valuble data is where you want to
stop being "original or authentic" in your restoration. Install another
vendor or don't use Remex for real data. You can use it to make the disk
go around, but even just spinning the disk made wierd schreeching noises.
In all my testing, I never found one that could read its own written disks
more than a few days. It was one of the worst drives ever made and
deservedly died an early death.
Billy