#Imation superdisk internal drive zip

Matsushita continued development of the technology and released the LS-240, which was still fairly available in Asia and Australia until 2003 but is now quite rare. It had enough popularity to leave the public uninterested in SuperDisk technology despite its superior design and its compatibility with the standard floppy disk.īy 2000, the entire removable-disk category quickly faced obsolescence by the falling prices of CD-R and CD-RW drives and in 2006 solid-state ( USB flash drives or USB keydrives), and the SuperDisk was no exception it has since been quietly discontinued, as were the other special disks, which are getting hard to find.

#Imation superdisk internal drive zip

The biggest hurdle standing in the way of success was that Iomega's Zip drive had been out for 3 years at that point. Most SuperDisk drives suffered from slow performance and reliability problems. Few OEMs supported it, aside from Compaq. However, the system was not a huge success. Imation mainly sold Matsushita-built drives under the SuperDisk name other companies tended to use the LS-120 name, and sold the Mitsubishi drives. Other companies involved in the development of SuperDisk included Compaq and OR Technology.

The idea eventually ended up at 3M, where the concept was refined and the design was licensed to established floppy drive makers Matsushita (Panasonic) and Mitsubishi. Iomega orphaned the project around the time they decided to release the Zip drive in 1994. It is one of the last examples of Floptical technology, where lasers are used to guide a magnetic head which is much smaller than those used in traditional floppy disk drives.

The design of the SuperDisk system came from an early 1990s project at Iomega. The '240 MB' drives have a true capacity of 240.75 MiB. The true capacity of these '120 MB' drives is 120.375 MiB (6848 cylinders × 36 blocks/cylinder × 512 bytes ). The newer LS-240 drives also have the ability to read and write regular 1.44 MB floppies at much higher densities. They also seemed to read and write faster to these sorts of disks than conventional 1.44 MB or 720 KB floppy drives. SuperDisk's main claim to fame was that in addition to being able to read and write its native 120 MB (later 240 MB) disks, the drives could read and write the 1.44 MB and 720 KB floppy formats ( MFM) that were still popular at the time. Also known as the LS-120 and the later variant LS-240, the SuperDisk was introduced by 3M's storage products group (later known as Imation) circa 1997 as a high-speed, high-capacity alternative to the 90 mm (3.5 in), 1.44 MB floppy disk.