The humble floppy disk, in its various incarnations, ruled the computer world for a while long time. Too long, apparently. Finally, the small capacity of floppy disks was no match for growing hard drives and ballooning file sizes, so something new was needed.
Actually, changing the floppy was easier said than done. Finally, the true successor to the floppy disk It was a CD and USB drives. This is quite confusing on the surface, because on paper Imation’s SuperDisks looked like the perfect successor to the floppy disk. hard competition.
SuperDisk tried to be the “perfect” floppy disk upgrade
Falling replacement
was quite a bit”floppy disk killersIt tried to dethrone the ubiquitous plastic discs, but the LS-120 SuperDisk most closely resembles what it’s trying to replace. Compare these LS-120 drives to standard 3.5-inch floppy disks and remember that’s 1.44MB vs. 120MB!
The overall dimensions and shape are similar. The only immediate “not” SuperDisk is the interesting design of the sliding disk protector, which has a more sophisticated and futuristic look.
Backward compatibility was not enough to change user habits
You can still copy that diskette
SuperDisks simply weren’t like the floppy disks they were trying to replace. If you replace your diskette with the LS-120 drive, you can continue to use all diskettes. You didn’t need to fit two 3.5-inch drives, which most home computers weren’t built for back then.
So SuperDisk was once again set up for success. There was no downside to going technical. You can use your own SuperDisks and floppy disks that everyone gives you. However, the LS-120 faced the same chicken-and-egg problem with the floppy disk’s rooted position.
In fact, part of the problem may have been that to the average person, SuperDisks weren’t all that different from floppy disks unless you took the time to read about them.
- Storage Capacity
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6 TB
- Brand
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Seagate
The Seagate Expansion 6TB external hard drive is a great starting point if you’re building a laptop NAS that offers plenty of capacity for backups and media. It’s affordable, easy to install, and fast enough over USB 3.0 for most home server use cases.
CDs didn’t care about compatibility – and that’s the point
The future should look like the future
While 120MB is more than 1.44MB, it’s nothing compared to 650MB vs. 1.44MB! Before it was possible to burn files to a CD using a computer, it quickly became the preferred method of distributing software. Who would want to install Windows from several dozen floppy disks when you can extract it on a single CD?
Perhaps things could have been different if the software developers had chosen the LS-120 to distribute their software. But discs were much more expensive than CDs, which cost only pennies a disc. Here again we have the old chicken-and-egg situation, but it favored CDs because you had a good reason to buy a CD-ROM drive. All the content was going there.
Meanwhile, conventional floppy disks were still suitable for small files, and the minute CD-R technology became available, it was all over for floppy disks as well.
Price, speed and reliability killed SuperDisk
It has a theme with floppy killers
Likewise Zip, Jazzand Klik drivers, SuperDisk had technical problems. Relatively unreliable disks and disks, at least early on, did not inspire people to trust the mature floppy disks and later, of course, the mechanically simple and robust CDs.
Access times were a point of contention, as Imation’s “floptic” technology, which uses lasers to aid in magnetic tracking, was slow. Transfer speeds were not bad. Although the theoretical maximum speed was 1.2MB/s, in the real world it was close to 2x CD-ROM speed. So you can imagine how quickly CD-ROM drives have pushed this limit with 4x, 8x, 12x speed drives.
A changing idea of what “retention” means
CDs normalized cheap, disposable, distribution-oriented media. Instead of reusing multiple discs forever, people started burning archives, music collections, and software installers onto stacks of cheap optical discs.
USB flash drives arrived shortly thereafter and combined portability, rewritability, speed, and large capacity in a small solid-state device, making both technologies obsolete for small personal removable storage.
The LS-120 is a great example of the “build a better mousetrap” challenge. The idea was to make a floppy disk, but better. The thing is, the world didn’t need a better floppy disk. Basically, different solutions were needed. Had the LS-120 arrived 10 years earlier, it might have been formidable, but time was not on its side.
