I worked at Iomega in the late 90s. Prior to that, they had their own floptical product, something like 20 MB. It had, well, flopt by the time I was there, but the hardware and media were still around internally, and some of the software still supported them. Unlike LS120, the disks for the Iomega floptical felt exactly like ordinary floppy disks. That might’ve just been because they were prototypes using off the shelf floppy tooling or something. That was actually a bit of a problem, as you had to look carefully to know what kind of media you had. I got used to sliding the door open and looking through the media held up to a light to tell the things apart by color. And yeah, the drives could read and write ordinary floppies too. I have no idea what the speed was like, but can confirm that they sounded amazing. I suspect the reason backwards-compatible superfloppies (and high-speed floppy drives) mostly failed is a branding/marketing thing. The floppy form factor had been around for SO LONG people just knew what they were. “Floppies” had become throughly commoditized things by then. You can’t brag to your geek friends about your cool new thing when it looks and feels at best like a bog-standard floppy, and at worst like a cheap knockoff. Overcoming that would’ve been difficult, though yeah, it certainly didn’t help that nobody thought to write “4x” all over the product. I suspect Zip had better success largely because it felt *different* than floppies. I’m obviously biased as hell, but to me they felt more satisfying to use. People could see one from a distance and go “hey, what’s that?”
To this day, I wish floptical would’ve been a thing. I remember it reading about it in PC magazines, but I don’t remember even seeing one for sale anywhere at the mall.
I still don't understand why manufacturers didn't put a massive "2X" or "4X" on the faster drives like they did with CD drives like you said. It would have been a huge deal for a small software developer that makes dozen and dozen of copies! Excellent video!
I think I can probably guess as to why at least LaCie specifically didn't want to stick a giant 4x on their drives, and why they wouldn't even if the rest of the industry did: they were a Mac company. Their peripherals were specifically designed for Macs, and their products were targeted to Mac users. That probably also explains their obscurity, especially when you consider that Apple played an active role in driving the push away from floppies to begin with.
I think it's because drive speed was not an industry standard for floppy drives(software and drive electronics didn't care how fast things were) and thus "X" didn't mean much. CDROM technology worked with an expected speed rating to ensure proper transfers. This is a good thing and a bad thing, because on one hand it ensures that the consumer knows how fast the drive can read, but on the other hand, some legacy software will not work right if the drive reads too fast. Also, I haven't burned a music CD in a long time but I think I remember having problems playing discs written at higher than 1X.
As shown in my Oddware video about it, the Sony 2X drive did originally come with a removable set of white and blue top covers that had a big 2X logo on them. CRD just happens to be missing either of them.
I was really sick the other night and the only way I could get my mind off the body aches and shivering was a Cathode Ray Dude video marathon. These videos always comfort me for some reason. Thank you.
I can't tell you how happy I am to hear that. I literally started my channel because I thought most youtubers were too boisterous and abrasive. I hope you're feeling better and I'm glad I could help.
I have an old ThinkPad made during the brief period when they were available with an LS240 drive. It has two drive bays, so guess what I did? I put *two* LS240 drives in it. It's the fastest way I've ever seen to copy floppy disks!
Oh hey it's VWestlife! I've seen you leaving comments on a bunch of videos lately, and it's gotten to the point where I hear your voice as I read them :·P
You are right, your Sony is missing a plastic trim which states 2x. BTW, the reason it's a detachable trim was because you could choose between either the white or blue one.
@@LickMyMusketBallsYankee WTF are you trying to do here? The author of the video is missing his plate. I still have the plate he needs even after losing almost everything to an EF4 tornado that has left me homeless. Even today I am sleeping in a rented workshop against the lease and you’re trying to mock me just because you didn’t understand what I was trying to say.
My favorite is the LS-120's successor, the LS-240. One super-interesting thing it could do is you could format regular 1.44 MB disks as *32 MB* disks. Needless to say, you needed another LS-240 drive to read it back, but it was ridiculously useful back in the day, instantly turning your old 1.44MB floppies into something far more useful. (But the 32 MB formatting made it behave like an early CD-RW - you had to reformat and rewrite the entire disk any time you wanted to change data.) The big problem with LS-240 is its rarity - it was only sold in Asia/Pacific, and was only on the market about two years. LS-120 drives are easy enough to find, if a little expensive at times; LS-240 drives almost never show up for sale, and are hideously expensive when they do.
putting 32 mega on sounds interesting. I guess the 2 MB unformatted capacity plus some compression or very small, and finicky tracks. No wonder it would need a reformat to write new data.
@@HappyBeezerStudios It didn’t use the original format at all, or compression. It used completely different formatting with more tightly packed tracks and denser tracks. Basically stretching the magnetic formulation to its limit.
@@dustojnikhummer It turned a 1.44 microfloppy into a 32 MB disk, that was only readable on another LS240 drive. And it was written like an early CD-R, all at once. To change a file or erase a file, you had to erase the whole disk and rewrite it. (IIRC.)
Growing up with floppy drives, when I found the 4x floppy in the sony mavica camera I was amazed they never became popular. Taking a picture and hearing all those quick clicks is awesome.
I guess that the reason was mostly cost, a 1999 Sony Mavica cost roughly $1400~$1700 (depending on model) in 2022 dollars. Smart Media using cameras won over the FDD cameras because they were generally cheaper, given the other features were the same.
@@dj1NM3 And once flash media started coming down enough in price, even as it went _up_ in capacity ... it was basically no contest. My dad's first digital camera was a Kodak one he got in 2003 for fairly cheap as it was being discontinued, and it already was using SD cards in addition to a limited internal memory. I used it a lot more than he did, before I got a lower-end Canon* for myself in 2007. * PowerShot A550, if anyone's interested. I still have it too, though it mostly collects dust since I got a smartphone.
You should get an LS-240 drive and play with the "FD32" format that allows it to store 32MB on normal floppies. SMR (shingled magnetic recording) way before it was ever used in hard drives...
Surely the shingled recording requires particular floppies with the shingles laid down in that pattern, like the hard drives have? So doing 32MB on a normal floppy couldn't be shingled. It's probably more like increased accuracy meaning more places to lay down a bit. Somebody mentioned the 32MB disks would have to be written disk-at-once, you'd "burn" one like a CD and couldn't alter it without wiping it and starting all over again. That's reminiscent of how shingled recording works. But again, wouldn't it require special shingled disks for that? It is just the 240MB disks that were shingled then? And maybe the disk-at-once thing with the 32MB floppies is down to them recording such tiny bits so accurately, that to hit them just write to record over would be difficult, hence you just start again from scratch and lay down new bit patterns.
I checked RUclips to see if there was a technology connections video but found a new cathode Ray dude video. I genuinely went "That's even better" Kuddos to you mate
I've always wanted an LS-120 drive for myself. When I was younger and stupid I saw one at a local thrift shop, complete in box, but it said "For Mac" so I assumed it wouldn't work on a PC at all and didn't get it. The SuperDrive came from that weird era where "it has USB" meant "it's made for Macs"
Man kudos. You literally got a golf clap from me here while watching it. I don't think I've heard anyone so much as mention BeOS in close to two decades. And yes i actually ran it and have the install media somewhere :)
Hahaha, I gotta get myself a BeOS machine at some point just for the hell of it. Would have been fun to test on one in this video just to weird everyone out. "wtf is he even using?"
@@CathodeRayDude LOL I highly recommend dual Pentium 2 on a 440BX chipset. That's what I was running it on and it ran circles a around almost everything else. Especially when doing media stuff. BTW. If it wasn't for the pain of shipping I would have hit you up earlier. I have some interesting old school CRT stuff sitting around including an Ampro 3600 CRT projector and the HP version of the unicorn 16×10 format Sony GDM-FW900. Literally the same monitor but with an HP sticker on it
@Whyworry Street But you don't need a BeBox, it installs on normal PCs & Macs. When I tried it a long time ago on PC, I seem to remember it being nice & seeming efficient, but wasn't a lot of use without the variety of software to run on it.
I absolutely love your videos. From your delivery it is very obvious how passionate you are about all of the retro stuff, and you are able to share that passion in the way you communicate. You have very quickly become my 'fav' retro tech channel ( sorry LGR, Techmoan, 8-bit Guy, etc.). Keep up the good work!
I remember seeing an advertisement around 1996 for HD floppy drives that had 2 MB of cache memory. Inserting a disk would load the entire disk into the cache and can be worked on completely in cache. Obviously, these were geared for high end duplication with a high end price.
Kind of like having a recoverable RAM drive on the Amiga 500....you could make a temporary bootable filesystem that would survive a warm reboot...kind of like having SSD boot times on August 19, 1989.
25:10 - I am not an expert, but I have some real world experience having great success in archiving damaged floppies using an LS-120. Although I now own an AppleSauce FDC for magnetic flux level imaging, I had previously made extensive use of my LS-120 when imaging high density floppies with read issues (they won't read Macintosh 800K disks.) Like I said, I'm no expert (and I know I'm remembering it wrong as it was explained to me by another person, so please excuse me) but basically the LS-120 can read 1/2 a track (block?), whereas regular floppies read the whole thing. So if data is written to the first part of the track, but not into the damaged second part, then the LS-120 will read it successfully; whereas a regular floppy drive will report a read error and fail. I have successfully read damaged floppies off my LS-120 that will _not_ read on my OEM Sony or any other floppy drive. Sometimes I have to drop down into a HEX and/or resource editor and copy/paste byte-by-byte, but the LS-120 will work when no other drive will.
This is consistent with the theory so it looks very plausible. Because LS120 disk tracks are thinner, the LS120 drive head is smaller, so even if part of the track width is damaged because of a dirty head or similar, the smaller LS120 may be able pick the signal written on undamaged part of the track even when the real 1.44 drive could not do that. Because LS120 needs to pick smaller magnetized area, the head is also more sensitive so it probably is able to read partially demagnetized standard floppies that standard drives could not read I never had a chance to test all that but what you say aligns well with it.
Nothing reads a 400K or 800K Macintosh floppy except an old Macintosh with a Mac floppy drive. The only thing I can think of that might be able to do an image copy of those disks without a working Mac is a Kryoflux. Possibly a Catweasel. Would have to go digging for info on that. Dunno about the positively antique Central Point Option Board. That now very hard to find piece of gear plugged inline between a PC's floppy controller and drive to read a wide range of disk format using DOS software.
@@greggv8 Kryoflux is hit or miss. It requires a very specific Sony drive (Sony MPF920-E) to be able to work with Macintosh 400K and 800K disks. Even then, there's no guarantee. Incidentally, I just picked up a Revision 2 AppleSauce FDC which now supports standard PC floppy drives (3.5 & 5.25.) So it's basically a Kryoflux now, but with native Macintosh disk support.
I've already been subscribed a while, but I am here in the comments to say: I AM DEFINITELY INTO THIS SORT OF THING! I absolutely love discussions about lesser-known formats, or drives to read said formats. To give you an idea...I am also subscribed to LGR and Techmoan. I hope you get so many more subs because this sort of fine look at a seemingly outdated topic is the kind of thing I live for and you do an excellent job of it.
The Dell drive probably has an internal controller so they don't need the pins of an analog floppy interface on the hot-swap connector. And that's not even counting the ability to run over USB. That probably makes it more practical to bump the speed a little, since there's no need for backward compatibility with old motherboard floppy controllers.
I'd argue that *every* single one of these fast floppies has an internal controller as the legacy Shugart interface didn't allow drives to go any faster. There were a few hacks and other ways to do it, but they would be completely out of spec from the floppy interface.
The LS120 he whips out at the end is actually an IDE/ATAPI drive inside an IDE-SCSI enclosure; or at least my one was. The "USB" cable that plugs into it is actually a USB-SCSI bridge device. This was probably done so Imation could sell the same device as USB, FireWire, or parallel port just by changing the cable. It isn't inconceivable that many of these high-speed floppy drives are actually ATAPI devices; especially the ones that fit into laptop multi-bays.
@@Stoney3K Another fun fact is the that magnetic barcode waveform from the head is low enough in pitch that a common RTL-SDR radio dongle can pass it if you've soldered it for direct sampling.
Amiga had an 880k and 1.76 mb format. They had 11 sectors per track, instead of 9... using up a lot of the "gap" space that other computers had between sectors.
"Why they were still doing that in 2002..." That seems to be Sony's thing. When they back a format, they really don't give up. How else do you explain the fact that Sony stopped manufacturing Betamax tapes a few years after the last LaserDisc player hit the market?
In fairness, Beta was much bigger in Japan than it ever was overseas. And Sony was still making and supporting older professional Betacam formats, the first of which I believe used the same tape formulation. So pumping out Beta tapes was a fairly simple proposition.
It was such a crazy wild west time when companies were fighting over who was going to be "the next floppy". Iomega made what felt like ten different disk types, there were weird floppy variants, there were crazy companies trying to make CD burners a thing way before the tech was cheap enough to make them a consumer thing, SD cards were super tiny and still cost as much as whatever device you used them in, and yet the internet was starting to pop off and we all had more data then ever before. Not to mention all the companies turning media format duds into music players to try and salvage all the mechanisms they bought/manufactured or to create lock-in. Absolutely amazing time to be into technology.
Love that you featured that dell floppy drive. When I was in high school we had laptop carts full of the D620s and our science didn't know about the mini usb port and I did and got a McDonalds free small fry certificate out of it lol!!
No offense to your video, the part I saw was great btw, I put this on and laid down after along day of university and instantly passed out for an hour. I just wanted to thank you for letting me get in an absolutely devious power nap this afternoon
*_Pro tip #1:_* LS-120 drives can often read diskettes that are unreadable in "regular" diskette drives. I think the LS-120 actively follows the data tracks on the diskettes, which, if so, is enormously better than the way the regular diskettes work. Regular diskette drives seek to more-or-less the right track by "dead reckoning." So if you write data with one drive the tracks will be be positioned slightly differently than if you write data with another drive. That means your data is more likely to read correctly with the drive that wrote it, than with some other drive. Worse, the formatting information is written at a different (earlier) time than the data, so if you format with one drive (or buy a preformatted diskette) and write to it with another, you end up with alignment mismatches, and unreliable reading on ANY drive. Worse yet, Windows likes to write to the diskettes even when you don't tell it to do so, to update the "last accessed" fields in the directories. That means the most important part of the diskette (the directories) tends to get written to by many different drives, which means that the directories often become unreadable (though an LS-120 might be able to recover the data). *_Pro tip #2:_* for maximum reliability you should format and write a diskette on the SAME drive, and then use the write-protect tab to prevent it from being written to by any other drive. *_Plea for help:_* I have some 8" diskettes that I would love to recover data from, however the adhesive which sticks the oxide layer to the substrate has failed, so if I put them into my 8" Shugart diskette drive the oxide rubs off. So I'm afraid to even try to read the most important ones, since that would destroy any hope of ever recovering the data. Does anyone know how to read them?
I don't know if the Windows tools do similar, but, as a Linux user, I'd have tried doing the file-copy benchmarking using a tool for detecting counterfeit flash memory media named F3. F3 works by filling every last accessible bit of the drive with data and then reading it back out to check for corruption, truncation, performance below the listed performance class, etc. What makes F3 so suitable is: 1. The write and read are separate tools (f3_write and f3_read), so you can write the disk once, then read it back multiple times... optionally, on as many separate machines as you want to be absolutely certain about that cache situation. 2. Because counterfeit flash media may be perfectly good at storage and retrieval but lying about the performance class, both the writing and reading tools will give you a performance read-out. (eg. The very first USB flash stick I ever owned, a Lexar Jump Drive from the 2000s, returns "Writing speed: 679.51 KB/s" and "Reading speed: 833.53 KB/s".) 3. Most importantly, it doesn't care what kind of device you use it on. You just point it at a path, and it'll fill the drive that path sits on to capacity or, conversely, read out and verify the test files in that directory. For a test, I slapped a random blank AT&T-branded 1.44M floppy into my favourite Chinese USB floppy drive (which looks like it's using the same housing as the Toshiba drive), reformatted it, ran `f3_write /media/ssokolow/454E-AD36`, ensured caches were flushed, and then ran `f3_read /media/ssokolow/454E-AD36`. The result? "Reading speed: 35.59 KB/s" Interestingly, the writing speed was more in line with your numbers on the Dell drive, despite my concerns that there might be some form of in-drive write caching that F3 might not be able to bypass, and what sounded like a retry for an iffy sector that didn't happen during the reading process: "Writing speed: 32.35 KB/s" As for raw image benchmarking, maybe use the DD port that come with Git for Windows? On Linux, this command `dd iflag=sync if=/dev/sdg of=/dev/null`, produced this very suitable output: 1474560 bytes (1.5 MB, 1.4 MiB) copied, 40.2245 s, 36.7 kB/s (I'm assuming `iflag=sync` is all I need. I normally use `ddrescue` for my raw disk reading and benchmark things using `hyperfine`, which is more oriented toward hot-cache benchmarking with statistical analysis. I don't normally have a need to benchmark cold-cache performance of hardware.)
I got the dell floppy drive awhile ago for my latitude d830 which I saved from the recycling centre. The bonus was it had a USB port which was amazing because I didn’t have to use it with dell’s proprietary D-bay.
I gotta say, I chuckled when you said 12 seconds was unacceptable. Like, I get where your coming from but I also remember both 1 hour photo and, before that, the dread of mailing it out to the photo lab. One week to 12 seconds in a couple decades.
I learned of the existence of more-than-one-speed FDD's, er, last week. And, as it happens, from a Mavica product picture. Sony still offers the manuals and such on their website, which is nice. Sooo, I got two Mavica's on the way now. :) One other thing caught my attention, Sony made an adapter for Mavica, memory card-to-FDD. I wonder how quickly that reads.
You could even use those Memory Stick adapters in PCs' internal floppy drives, if you had drivers for them. (Which were probably never made for OSes after Windows XP.)
@@Kumimono The limit would be 32 megabytes...due to the 12 bit FAT filesystem...it was actually a problem in the days of the Crusades in the late 1980s for 5-1/4 inch stepper motor hard drives...
I was a proud owner of the LS120 drive. It would put 120 Megs on a physically identical disk to a standard floppy just with higher density medium. And also read and wrote 1.44 meg floppies at increased speeds. I think it still exists in my storage, good luck finding media for it though. Thanks for another great Video.
We have those exact Dell drives at work at the antivirus scan stations, actually. Industrial environments still use them a bit. Older CNC tools have floppy drives for loading G-code and I've seen a few oscilloscopes with them as well.
I absolutely love you videos, it's been a good minute since I've found a channel i enjoy watching as much, nice long in depth videos just aren't made anymore like you make them and that's what I love most about them. Not afraid to get lost in needless detail, but also not so extreme with the IT speak that it can't be understood. Downright one of my favorite channels period
I believe the idea with that Dell floppy drive is to update a prior practice. Many laptops from the late 90's (Mainly IBM and Toshiba from my experience) had an external floppy disk connector that you could use to plug in the floppy drive caddy with a dongle. Dell decided "hey, we have a perfectly good universal port now, let's just use that!" and integrated it with the drive. Even when it's plugged into the modular bay, it shows up as a USB floppy drive, so it just runs USB to that proprietary connector.
I found a (roughly) 2x floppy drive in a 386 luggable laptop so faster drives have been around for a while, but I don't think I saw another in a built PC even in custom fleet PCs built in the late 2000s 🤷♂️ The reason why mavicas were relevant for so long is because floppies were ubiquitous in most work environments as USB keys were still quite expensive and early drives had writes limited to 100,000 cycles in any block before bricking themselves. No one really cared about or even noticed the write speed at that point, but you could find a box of disks in almost any desk at that point. That was cheaper and far more convenient than having to wait for developing.
Great little info video! Fornus who grew up with this technology, it's awesome to see what else was out there! I never had the mentality to pester my parents for the latest and the greatest. And nice Project Farm shout-out :) Gotta love Project Farm, he is indeed thorough with his tests, figures and spread sheets 😍
160KB capacity was specific to the Atari-8 bit computers and 5.25" drives, but for some reason it got mixed into the general floppy mythos. I do not blame you.
Acorn Computers did 100kB and 200kB on 5¼ inch. The 160kB was actually the 200kB media format, but IBM and others cut it down to 80% for reasons I've never understood. The 80% thing persisted, with 1.44MB & 2.88MB being 1.6MB & 3.2MB on Acorn. I'm pretty sure IBM PC-XT could read and write 160kb too.
@@Murph9000 The reason is that you need more than just data, you need sector heads and blank spaces in between. 200kB (decimal) was the raw capacity assuming constant nominal speed and a standard number of tracks, just like 2MB (decimal) is the raw capacity of the 3.5" HD floppy. They could have gone for 180kB with smaller gaps, or even 192kB with sector interlacing or larger sectors, but probably kept it down for reliability (even though that was proven to be unnecessary). On your regular HD floppy, you can get 1.6 MB with tighter spacing alone, 1.68MB with interlacing (2 to 1), 1.76MB with larger sectors (1KiB) alone, or even 1.92MB with a combination of both (2 to 1 interlace with 2KiB sectors).
Whoever designed that DELL drive was absolutely brilliant to add that USB port to it, they really REALLY didn't have to, but did it anyway. They are also very reliable drives too ! And quite cheap because almost nobody knows about the USB party trick !
It's been -i think- 8 years since i last bought a USB floppy drive, it looks the same as many of the ones shown but its speed was exasperatingly slow. Less than 10kB/s and actually reading a floppy succesfully was a roll of the dice. I don't remember my 1999 PC's floppy drive to be that slow!
towards the end of the tech quality took a dive. not only the drive, but the floppies themselves. you can get a pack of used floppies from the late 80s/early 90s and they still work perfectly fine, but a pack of new old stock from the early 2000s is a gamble. 5.25" are even more reliable.
Never "benched" it before, but this video got me thinking... My go-to USB floppy is a TEAC FD-05UW, apparently this is a "2X" drive, reads a 1.44MB disk at about 50KB/s. Neat!
The Dell 620 was my first work computer. I was an engineer at a vehicle OEM and have many a fond memory of this thing. I wrote my wedding vows on it. Once, I sheered a 1000$ license dongle clean off the USB port and the port still worked. After I wore off the Ethernet port from years of continuous use, I got a USB Ethernet dongle to delay IT taking it away 😢
I've got the first mavica with optical zoom and the file sizes vary greatly depending on the brightness of the recorded picture. Love that camera. I really enjoyed this video. Yet again I need to go buy more stuff because of your video haha. Im the weirdo that still buys floppy disks and uses them weekly, almost daily.
LS120 drives like the wear in a way that launches the disks 5 feet on eject. Always entertaining, as there is no warning. You push the button, and a half second later, the disk hits you straight in the face at mach 3.
So your video got me to dig out my old USB floppy drive I used when I did tech support. I always thought it was weird at the time but now it gets even weirder. The drive in question is a QPS LKM-FK73-D, which is a rebadged Panasonic that shares the same model number. In addition it is maked as a 240mb super disk and according to the panasonic manual it can reformat 1.44 disks to 32mb with their included software. Also some old articles when this was new seem to claim read write speeds in the 600kbs range. No idea if that last part is true and I have no means to test it but thought you and your followers might like to know.
Project Farm~! That guy is amazing, and honestly you do just as in-depth of a review of something, but in a different style! Love both your and his channel! glad to see more people appreciate his content!
19:50 I am that one guy who had an LS-120. Internal, it was great - hooked up via PATA and replaced normal floppy drive - still read floppies but much faster. I loved it at the time
Going through school through the 00's, I don't recall ever noting floppies as particularly slow. I do recall the primary complaint we had at school and at home was the low amount of data storage compared to the incredibly expensive ($40USD for 256MB) flash drives at the time. I imagine we would have seen faster floppy drives much more often if they had ever really gotten large enough for their slow speeds to be truly tedious compared to the even greater tedium of archive splitting and disk swapping which always consumed even more time than read/write cycles.
I remember people at school taking advantage of the fragiliity of floppies to excuse themselves for missing work. Oops, the floppy got corrupted, tough luck!
Watched this on my E6420 that I absolutly love. The second best computer I've ever had (best was a wierd tablet PC with a flippable screen and a wonderful pen that was the bomb when editiong photos) and I have changed the keyboard twice (expendables) and the palmrest part once since it broke b y the fingerprint reader. It's my daily driver and have been for at least 9 years. It's slow by todays standards but still feel quick enough for me.
Fun guess on the LS120 here! The read/write head is physically smaller in the LS120 drive (though the head carrier material that rides on the disc may be similarly sized), so it can lay out tiny tracks on the LS120 discs without overlapping. When it goes to read a 1.44mb disk, it just goes to a track, senses its huge track flux, and goes "yup that's zeroes and ones". Thus, reading is quick and easy. But if it wrote out data to be compatible with that same 1.44mb drive, its much smaller head would write out a nearly invisible signal for the older drives with larger heads! So, it probably has to write each track 4 times (or more), seeking a split track forward each time, to lay out parallel flux spots that appear as one "big dot" to older drives. Think "ballpoint pen vs. sharpie". How many lines would a ballpoint pen need to make to equal the width of a sharpie? This is just a guess based on what I know about magnetic stuff, and how it likely works. I saw that segment on the LS120's slow write speeds and it immediately clicked. Hope it's mind fuel for anyone else curious as well!
@@---li4yn Bang on! I just dug into it a bit, found a more recent teardown/deep-dive on it, and saw that the bottom side of an LS-120 disc actually seems to be optical! So of course a second set of heads must be present. That's wild. Ah well, that theory out the window.
Fun Fact, I have one of those SONY 2X Drives, and it usually comes with a black cover that has "SONY 2x FDD (2X SPEED FLOPPY DISK DRIVE) MPF88E-UA" on the cover.
We were still creating and archiving these floppys up to when I quit film/tv archiving and vaulting in 2013. So many places still used floppys for Closed Captioning because it was a such and old, unchanged system at the time.
I have an LS120 drive that I used to archive all my 3.5" floppy disks. One of the selling points for me was that it would also read 720kB disks, which my USB floppy drive just won't do. It wouldn't read my single sided floppies though, but I managed to come up with another solution for that.
The insanity of a floppy disk camera with a USB port is amazing. The entire point of the Mavica was the floppy working in any computer. It truly defines a bridge product. By then I had a tiny 5MP Sony with a memory stick, weird times.
Yup, USB was still up-and-coming in the late 90s, and flash memory cards were still pretty expensive for the amount of storage they offered. Though Sony did offer a Memory Stick adapter for the floppy drive of later Mavicas. You could even use it in your PC's floppy drive if you had the special drivers the thing needed.
Hey man, this is probably the fourth video of yours I've stumbled across and I keep forgetting to subscribe. You've got a great casual tone and presentation style but with some solid info as well. I've remedied my error and added you to my subscribed channels. Thanks for doing what you do!
Just starting to get fascinated with old technology and the things that go along with it. Whenever we start having conventions again down here in portland id love to run into you potentially.
When I was a kid, around 1998 to 2000, my elementary school teacher had a ZIP drive sitting on his classroom's computer. It fascinated me. (this was in the middle of France, in the countryside, too)
Oh hey, the Fastcache! We had one in the work desktop my dad had around 2000, it gave me a very incorrect idea of how fast normal floppy drives were supposed to be as a kid. Every now and then when they would sell off parts and systems they were replacing he would come home with a weird treat like the floppy drive that didn't suck, the UPS that kinda did suck, or the early ergonomic peripherals his bosses didn't stick with long enough to actually give an honest attempt
Hey brother, i just wanted to say thank you for your videos. At night I like long form, calm videos that I can lay there and listen to and you are the master at this. You're descriptions are so detailed that you can close your eyes and really understand, follow and enjoy the script and I for one appreciate that. Don't get me wrong, or take this the wrong way because I watch your stuff during the day too, but I really do these long form, information rich, chill videos. Whats better than falling asleep and reaming of retro computers? amirite
My uncle still uses zip disks to back up an old offline work PC.. CDs definitely started to take over pretty fast and might be why we don't see floppy marketing. Instead of waiting a few seconds for a reliable megabyte.. With CD burners you now wait 2+ hours to test and burn only to fail to buffer under run, or media failure!! Yay!
The smallest capacity 3,5" floppy standard that I know of, is the one that came with the HP-150 (AKA the Touchscreen), which held 270 kB formatted capacity in a SS disk.
Hey, nice video. You might want to ditch stop watches for a linux console and the "time" command. Then you could easily do something like: time sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/fdd and have the entire floppy written full of zeros and getting the wall clock time presented in the end.
There was a development of the Floppy Drive known as Floptical drives, my memory is a little fuzzy here, but with specific floptical media the storage was over 100MB, silent and fast operation plus a few other benefits, and used the IDE interface. However, when using normal floppies, the usual noisy operation occurred but operated at around 2.5 times faster than a typical floppy drive. I had one of these, it sat in a typical 3.5 inch floppy drive bay and other then a gold arrow on the facia and mechanical eject system (like the Apple floppy drives), you’d never know it was anything special. I got mine as I replaced one for a customer and quickly realised it wasn’t a drive fault but user error with a report on a ‘faulty’ drive, but work said it had to go into the waste skip, which I appeared to do, but to prove the point out in in my toolkit. Installing it I’m my PC at home, I showed the drive was just fine and could go into spares stock but that was refused so it stayed in my system and gave me years of reliable use. Shame you can’t get the media anymore ☹️
Man, the LS-120 really triggers my nostalgia. I didn't care if it wasn't as great as a Zip drive, it was my best friend during college. Everything was on a few LS-120 disks going back and forth with me daily.
Thanks CRD for another great video that even though was on a topic I originally didn't care much about, as the video went on I became more and more interested and highly entertained. Loving this channel more and more and everyday. Thanks for all the hard work for the sake of our entertainment!
The most impressive feat of accelerating floppy read times I ever saw was Lucasarts’ Koronis Rift on the C64. Anyone who’s had the pleasure of owning a Commodore C1541 5.25” floppy drive will know how leisurely they were, frequently being beaten by tape turbo-loaders, and their only saving grace being random access compared to tapes. Koronis Rift was startling at the time as rather than waiting minutes during loading you’d hear an unexpected and rapid succession of clicks from the drive and then boom, ready to play. My guess was some early compression or someone had written a custom drive routine but whatever it was it was unlike any other loading experience on the C1541.
I had a SCSI LS120 I kept around for data recovery. An LS120 + ddrescue would turn an overnight job into a 1h job. There was a period in the early 2000's where everyone was racing to save their data as their decade-old FDD's went bad and that drive made me a ton of money.
Fin fact: Just recently, as of 2022. The Japanese government has started making the move from using floppies to store Government records and other documents. And going more into Solid State Drives and other means of electronic storage. So as much as the public moved onto using other forms of storage. Governments kept using the form. Right until until the end of time, so to speak.
I had a parallel port LS120 back in the day. I bought one the first time I saw it in 1997. It saved me a bunch of time installing software from floppies. I was a network engineer and I would setup Novell servers for companies and I would have to install office, or wordperfect on the the server from a big stack of floppies. I also had to constantly load updates for insurance companies that came of floppies sometimes there would be 25 or 30 disks. I used the crap out of that LS120. I still have one today. It's a USB one, and it still works, but i don't use it very often.
Fun fact - many japanese laws still require government officials to use floppy drives as data storage. Just now Japan started to clean up laws from obsolete media references.
I had an LS120 drive in the 90s. The computer lab at my school had machines with LS120 drives and it was a great way to download stuff there and bring it home.
360/400kB 5¼” 80 track double sided drives were a thing. The smallest I have personally experienced was 80/100kB 40 track single sided 5¼ inch, which was actually a common format for software distribution in the 400kB market to ensure all drives could read them.
Nothing in this video surprised me until you pulled out that Sony Mavica DSLR. I just imagine the use case scenario that caused that to be made. "Help, Sony, my 640480 pictures aren't clear enough!"
@@CathodeRayDude Wow, man, that is ridiculously awesome! I take it it only shoots JPEGs, huh? How many full size and quality pictures can a floppy hold, if you don't mind my asking?
My dad used to use an LS-120 for backup when they first came out. He used that same drive, which he still has, although his current work computer can no longer use it, and it still works. It was an internal ATA drive. I seem to remember it writing to regular floppies much faster than a normal floppy drive, maybe 2x, and reading from regular floppies even faster yet, maybe 4x. Reading and writing to SuperDisks (as they were marketed), was about the same as CRD found, which, in the late 90's was awesome. This sped up backup times immensely. Originally, in the 80's, he would backup to around a half-dozen 5.25" floppies. By the mid-90's, he switched to 3.5" floppies, which were bigger and faster. But, his business was growing, and so the backups took more and more disks. By the late 90's, he was using around a dozen floppies for his backups. This would take around fifteen minutes of staring at the computer, waiting. When he switched to LS-120 disks, it went down to a single disk, that only took around a minute to backup to.
I bought an IDE LS120 drive about 6 years ago specifically for the fast floppy disk functionality. It was new old stock and I even got an IDE to SATA connector so I could use it in my modern PC. It worked great for the task and then I put it away when all my floppies were imaged and haven't touched it since.
I wasn't excited about the last video, but this one definitely earned my sub. nice job. I agree with your initial preponderance of whether or not anyone had ever made a faster 3.5 inch floppy drive. Excellent info. Nicely done. New sub.
In the late 90's I interned at an insurance company while in High School. in their lab they had a disk duplicator that came pretty close to your 4x numbers if memory serves and it was fun loading that machine up with a whole stack of disks and watching it write to a disk, spit it out into a bin and then insert the next disk and repeat the cycle. The device connected to a desktop pc and ran proprietary software that ran the disk duplicator. I remember being amazed at how fast it could read and write disks and wondering why the heck "normal" floppy drives were so slow.
The disk/controller/software used to format the floppy could also wildly affect the read/write speed. I'm not sure if older stuff used sector interleave on PC floppies, but it would slow the reading of such disk on later hardware. And the normal sector order is actually ineffective when you read consecutive sectors en masse. What you need is a floppy formatted with so-called "sector sliding", where after reading one track and moving the head to the next, you don't have to wait while disk rotates for the first sector of the next track. The tool I've used in the 90s for this was fdformat. And while few years ago there was very little info about this on the internet aside from the tool itself in some old software archives, now the author uploaded the original source code and documentation to github! very cool.
I used to have an ATA LS120 and loved it. Less clutter in the desk, one less bay used in the computer, and it did everything I wanted it too. I can't vouch for the floppy write speeds as I primarily wrote to LS120 disks, but it was fast enough and reliable enough for me. I actually still wish I had it sometimes. And yes, I had a compatible motherboard which allowed me to boot off it.
Protip: Look for the Dell K9699. This is the internal floppy drive used in some of their older Optiplex line. While it isn't USB, it is a standard laptop drive in a adapter to mount it into a 3.5" drive bay. Now, some external USB drives can be gutted to reveal a standard laptop form factor drive inside. Replace the Optiplex drive with that, buy a USB header>socket adapter and BOOM, you get a internal mount, USB connected floppy drive.
If you want an ATA version of the LS-120 ... you already have it. The USB version is just an ATA internal drive packaged in external casing with a USB-ATA adapter. There's a couple of variations of the external drive that can be identified by the interface connector on the casing: if it has a standard USB B socket, then the USB-ATA adapter is inside the casing; if its a proprietary connector, then the USB-ATA adapter is part of the cable. Either way - its fairly simple (and non-destructive) to open the casing, retrieve the bare drive unit, and chuck it in a PC (and to reverse the procedure to restore the drive to its original condition)
Awesome video! I've always loved how quick the drives in the Mavicas are, it feels painful copying whole disks of images back with a standard speed drive, I very much need to get me a faster external drive!
I worked at Iomega in the late 90s. Prior to that, they had their own floptical product, something like 20 MB. It had, well, flopt by the time I was there, but the hardware and media were still around internally, and some of the software still supported them. Unlike LS120, the disks for the Iomega floptical felt exactly like ordinary floppy disks. That might’ve just been because they were prototypes using off the shelf floppy tooling or something. That was actually a bit of a problem, as you had to look carefully to know what kind of media you had. I got used to sliding the door open and looking through the media held up to a light to tell the things apart by color. And yeah, the drives could read and write ordinary floppies too. I have no idea what the speed was like, but can confirm that they sounded amazing.
I suspect the reason backwards-compatible superfloppies (and high-speed floppy drives) mostly failed is a branding/marketing thing. The floppy form factor had been around for SO LONG people just knew what they were. “Floppies” had become throughly commoditized things by then. You can’t brag to your geek friends about your cool new thing when it looks and feels at best like a bog-standard floppy, and at worst like a cheap knockoff. Overcoming that would’ve been difficult, though yeah, it certainly didn’t help that nobody thought to write “4x” all over the product.
I suspect Zip had better success largely because it felt *different* than floppies. I’m obviously biased as hell, but to me they felt more satisfying to use. People could see one from a distance and go “hey, what’s that?”
To this day, I wish floptical would’ve been a thing. I remember it reading about it in PC magazines, but I don’t remember even seeing one for sale anywhere at the mall.
Being the same form factor didn't seem to hurt DVD or Blu-ray, though the latter does feel a bit different due to the more advanced coating.
*laughs in click of death*
@@JoeMcGuire Hey ! I understand that reference.
I always wanted a Zip drive and then CD burners came along and I never thought about Zip Drives again.
@@Gatorade69 I had one in an old audio mixer long ago... Boss? I forget. Also one for the PC.
I still don't understand why manufacturers didn't put a massive "2X" or "4X" on the faster drives like they did with CD drives like you said. It would have been a huge deal for a small software developer that makes dozen and dozen of copies! Excellent video!
It's incredible! A few did, but you'd think they all would have - and you'd think these would have been more popular!
I think I can probably guess as to why at least LaCie specifically didn't want to stick a giant 4x on their drives, and why they wouldn't even if the rest of the industry did: they were a Mac company. Their peripherals were specifically designed for Macs, and their products were targeted to Mac users. That probably also explains their obscurity, especially when you consider that Apple played an active role in driving the push away from floppies to begin with.
Because it was under a moment that people didn’t care about; other features were much more relevant.
I think it's because drive speed was not an industry standard for floppy drives(software and drive electronics didn't care how fast things were) and thus "X" didn't mean much. CDROM technology worked with an expected speed rating to ensure proper transfers. This is a good thing and a bad thing, because on one hand it ensures that the consumer knows how fast the drive can read, but on the other hand, some legacy software will not work right if the drive reads too fast.
Also, I haven't burned a music CD in a long time but I think I remember having problems playing discs written at higher than 1X.
As shown in my Oddware video about it, the Sony 2X drive did originally come with a removable set of white and blue top covers that had a big 2X logo on them. CRD just happens to be missing either of them.
I was really sick the other night and the only way I could get my mind off the body aches and shivering was a Cathode Ray Dude video marathon. These videos always comfort me for some reason. Thank you.
I can't tell you how happy I am to hear that. I literally started my channel because I thought most youtubers were too boisterous and abrasive. I hope you're feeling better and I'm glad I could help.
I have an old ThinkPad made during the brief period when they were available with an LS240 drive. It has two drive bays, so guess what I did? I put *two* LS240 drives in it. It's the fastest way I've ever seen to copy floppy disks!
This man floppies
Oh hey it's VWestlife!
I've seen you leaving comments on a bunch of videos lately, and it's gotten to the point where I hear your voice as I read them :·P
@@fenflare I know, right? I can almost faintly hear those ‘90s radio jingles in the background as I’m reading!
Do you not remember those PSA's? Don't copy that floppy! :p
Don’t copy that floppy
You are right, your Sony is missing a plastic trim which states 2x.
BTW, the reason it's a detachable trim was because you could choose between either the white or blue one.
Yep. I still have my blue plate after losing the drive in an EF4 tornado.
@@emmettturner9452 Weird, I was also impacted by an EF4 tornado and I didn't lose mine. I guess that just means I'm better than you?
@@LickMyMusketBallsYankee WTF are you trying to do here?
The author of the video is missing his plate. I still have the plate he needs even after losing almost everything to an EF4 tornado that has left me homeless. Even today I am sleeping in a rented workshop against the lease and you’re trying to mock me just because you didn’t understand what I was trying to say.
@@emmettturner9452 don't let troll get you down. Best of luck mate.
@@jjones503 Thanks. I just reached out to CRD via Twitter DM to give the faceplate a new home and he seems happy to receive it. :)
My favorite is the LS-120's successor, the LS-240. One super-interesting thing it could do is you could format regular 1.44 MB disks as *32 MB* disks. Needless to say, you needed another LS-240 drive to read it back, but it was ridiculously useful back in the day, instantly turning your old 1.44MB floppies into something far more useful. (But the 32 MB formatting made it behave like an early CD-RW - you had to reformat and rewrite the entire disk any time you wanted to change data.)
The big problem with LS-240 is its rarity - it was only sold in Asia/Pacific, and was only on the market about two years. LS-120 drives are easy enough to find, if a little expensive at times; LS-240 drives almost never show up for sale, and are hideously expensive when they do.
putting 32 mega on sounds interesting. I guess the 2 MB unformatted capacity plus some compression or very small, and finicky tracks. No wonder it would need a reformat to write new data.
@@HappyBeezerStudios It didn’t use the original format at all, or compression. It used completely different formatting with more tightly packed tracks and denser tracks. Basically stretching the magnetic formulation to its limit.
@@AnonymousFreakYT Without any actual physical change to the media? So it just turned a 1.44 microfloppy into an LS240 disk? Now thats clever
@@dustojnikhummer It turned a 1.44 microfloppy into a 32 MB disk, that was only readable on another LS240 drive. And it was written like an early CD-R, all at once. To change a file or erase a file, you had to erase the whole disk and rewrite it. (IIRC.)
Growing up with floppy drives, when I found the 4x floppy in the sony mavica camera I was amazed they never became popular. Taking a picture and hearing all those quick clicks is awesome.
I guess that the reason was mostly cost, a 1999 Sony Mavica cost roughly $1400~$1700 (depending on model) in 2022 dollars.
Smart Media using cameras won over the FDD cameras because they were generally cheaper, given the other features were the same.
@@dj1NM3 And once flash media started coming down enough in price, even as it went _up_ in capacity ... it was basically no contest. My dad's first digital camera was a Kodak one he got in 2003 for fairly cheap as it was being discontinued, and it already was using SD cards in addition to a limited internal memory. I used it a lot more than he did, before I got a lower-end Canon* for myself in 2007.
* PowerShot A550, if anyone's interested. I still have it too, though it mostly collects dust since I got a smartphone.
You should get an LS-240 drive and play with the "FD32" format that allows it to store 32MB on normal floppies. SMR (shingled magnetic recording) way before it was ever used in hard drives...
Surely the shingled recording requires particular floppies with the shingles laid down in that pattern, like the hard drives have? So doing 32MB on a normal floppy couldn't be shingled. It's probably more like increased accuracy meaning more places to lay down a bit.
Somebody mentioned the 32MB disks would have to be written disk-at-once, you'd "burn" one like a CD and couldn't alter it without wiping it and starting all over again. That's reminiscent of how shingled recording works. But again, wouldn't it require special shingled disks for that?
It is just the 240MB disks that were shingled then? And maybe the disk-at-once thing with the 32MB floppies is down to them recording such tiny bits so accurately, that to hit them just write to record over would be difficult, hence you just start again from scratch and lay down new bit patterns.
@@greenaum They most likely used low level format to write new tracks and sectors.
I checked RUclips to see if there was a technology connections video but found a new cathode Ray dude video. I genuinely went "That's even better"
Kuddos to you mate
I've always wanted an LS-120 drive for myself. When I was younger and stupid I saw one at a local thrift shop, complete in box, but it said "For Mac" so I assumed it wouldn't work on a PC at all and didn't get it. The SuperDrive came from that weird era where "it has USB" meant "it's made for Macs"
It does use a weird USB converter cable. So this cable will work on a Windows PC?
It was just an ide drive in a weird ass enclosure, you could get a windows comparable enclosure if you really wanted to
@@vyressi HDD IDE to USB adapter will not work. I’ve tried it.
@@rsuryase Not a hard drive, an IDE adapter. It needs to support ATAPI.
@@vyressi does an ATAPI IDE to USB adapter even exists? I think all are designed for HDD.
Man kudos.
You literally got a golf clap from me here while watching it.
I don't think I've heard anyone so much as mention BeOS in close to two decades.
And yes i actually ran it and have the install media somewhere :)
Hahaha, I gotta get myself a BeOS machine at some point just for the hell of it. Would have been fun to test on one in this video just to weird everyone out. "wtf is he even using?"
@@CathodeRayDude
LOL I highly recommend dual Pentium 2 on a 440BX chipset.
That's what I was running it on and it ran circles a around almost everything else.
Especially when doing media stuff.
BTW. If it wasn't for the pain of shipping I would have hit you up earlier.
I have some interesting old school CRT stuff sitting around including an Ampro 3600 CRT projector and the HP version of the unicorn 16×10 format Sony GDM-FW900.
Literally the same monitor but with an HP sticker on it
Haiku is pretty neat
@Whyworry Street But you don't need a BeBox, it installs on normal PCs & Macs. When I tried it a long time ago on PC, I seem to remember it being nice & seeming efficient, but wasn't a lot of use without the variety of software to run on it.
@@CathodeRayDude Maybe call it "the OS that Apple nearly bought"? (Acknowledging Haiku would be a nice addition as well for modern use)
I absolutely love your videos. From your delivery it is very obvious how passionate you are about all of the retro stuff, and you are able to share that passion in the way you communicate. You have very quickly become my 'fav' retro tech channel ( sorry LGR, Techmoan, 8-bit Guy, etc.). Keep up the good work!
I remember seeing an advertisement around 1996 for HD floppy drives that had 2 MB of cache memory. Inserting a disk would load the entire disk into the cache and can be worked on completely in cache. Obviously, these were geared for high end duplication with a high end price.
Kind of like having a recoverable RAM drive on the Amiga 500....you could make a temporary bootable filesystem that would survive a warm reboot...kind of like having SSD boot times on August 19, 1989.
25:10 - I am not an expert, but I have some real world experience having great success in archiving damaged floppies using an LS-120. Although I now own an AppleSauce FDC for magnetic flux level imaging, I had previously made extensive use of my LS-120 when imaging high density floppies with read issues (they won't read Macintosh 800K disks.) Like I said, I'm no expert (and I know I'm remembering it wrong as it was explained to me by another person, so please excuse me) but basically the LS-120 can read 1/2 a track (block?), whereas regular floppies read the whole thing. So if data is written to the first part of the track, but not into the damaged second part, then the LS-120 will read it successfully; whereas a regular floppy drive will report a read error and fail. I have successfully read damaged floppies off my LS-120 that will _not_ read on my OEM Sony or any other floppy drive. Sometimes I have to drop down into a HEX and/or resource editor and copy/paste byte-by-byte, but the LS-120 will work when no other drive will.
This is consistent with the theory so it looks very plausible.
Because LS120 disk tracks are thinner, the LS120 drive head is smaller, so even if part of the track width is damaged because of a dirty head or similar, the smaller LS120 may be able pick the signal written on undamaged part of the track even when the real 1.44 drive could not do that.
Because LS120 needs to pick smaller magnetized area, the head is also more sensitive so it probably is able to read partially demagnetized standard floppies that standard drives could not read
I never had a chance to test all that but what you say aligns well with it.
Nothing reads a 400K or 800K Macintosh floppy except an old Macintosh with a Mac floppy drive. The only thing I can think of that might be able to do an image copy of those disks without a working Mac is a Kryoflux. Possibly a Catweasel. Would have to go digging for info on that. Dunno about the positively antique Central Point Option Board. That now very hard to find piece of gear plugged inline between a PC's floppy controller and drive to read a wide range of disk format using DOS software.
@@greggv8 Kryoflux is hit or miss. It requires a very specific Sony drive (Sony MPF920-E) to be able to work with Macintosh 400K and 800K disks. Even then, there's no guarantee.
Incidentally, I just picked up a Revision 2 AppleSauce FDC which now supports standard PC floppy drives (3.5 & 5.25.) So it's basically a Kryoflux now, but with native Macintosh disk support.
I've already been subscribed a while, but I am here in the comments to say: I AM DEFINITELY INTO THIS SORT OF THING! I absolutely love discussions about lesser-known formats, or drives to read said formats. To give you an idea...I am also subscribed to LGR and Techmoan. I hope you get so many more subs because this sort of fine look at a seemingly outdated topic is the kind of thing I live for and you do an excellent job of it.
The Dell drive probably has an internal controller so they don't need the pins of an analog floppy interface on the hot-swap connector. And that's not even counting the ability to run over USB. That probably makes it more practical to bump the speed a little, since there's no need for backward compatibility with old motherboard floppy controllers.
I'd argue that *every* single one of these fast floppies has an internal controller as the legacy Shugart interface didn't allow drives to go any faster. There were a few hacks and other ways to do it, but they would be completely out of spec from the floppy interface.
The LS120 he whips out at the end is actually an IDE/ATAPI drive inside an IDE-SCSI enclosure; or at least my one was. The "USB" cable that plugs into it is actually a USB-SCSI bridge device. This was probably done so Imation could sell the same device as USB, FireWire, or parallel port just by changing the cable.
It isn't inconceivable that many of these high-speed floppy drives are actually ATAPI devices; especially the ones that fit into laptop multi-bays.
@@Stoney3K Another fun fact is the that magnetic barcode waveform from the head is low enough in pitch that a common RTL-SDR radio dongle can pass it if you've soldered it for direct sampling.
Amiga had an 880k and 1.76 mb format. They had 11 sectors per track, instead of 9... using up a lot of the "gap" space that other computers had between sectors.
That was because the Amiga read/wrote whole tracks at a time, not individual sectors.
"Why they were still doing that in 2002..."
That seems to be Sony's thing. When they back a format, they really don't give up. How else do you explain the fact that Sony stopped manufacturing Betamax tapes a few years after the last LaserDisc player hit the market?
In fairness, Beta was much bigger in Japan than it ever was overseas. And Sony was still making and supporting older professional Betacam formats, the first of which I believe used the same tape formulation. So pumping out Beta tapes was a fairly simple proposition.
It was such a crazy wild west time when companies were fighting over who was going to be "the next floppy". Iomega made what felt like ten different disk types, there were weird floppy variants, there were crazy companies trying to make CD burners a thing way before the tech was cheap enough to make them a consumer thing, SD cards were super tiny and still cost as much as whatever device you used them in, and yet the internet was starting to pop off and we all had more data then ever before. Not to mention all the companies turning media format duds into music players to try and salvage all the mechanisms they bought/manufactured or to create lock-in.
Absolutely amazing time to be into technology.
Love that you featured that dell floppy drive. When I was in high school we had laptop carts full of the D620s and our science didn't know about the mini usb port and I did and got a McDonalds free small fry certificate out of it lol!!
No offense to your video, the part I saw was great btw, I put this on and laid down after along day of university and instantly passed out for an hour. I just wanted to thank you for letting me get in an absolutely devious power nap this afternoon
What I got from this was that you tested three old floppies drives and got speeds of 28.8, 33.6, and 56 KB/s
Love the Project Farm reference. We're gonna test that.
I save my GPT logs on floppies. It's a .... VERY weird feeling.
*_Pro tip #1:_* LS-120 drives can often read diskettes that are unreadable in "regular" diskette drives.
I think the LS-120 actively follows the data tracks on the diskettes, which, if so, is enormously better than the way the regular diskettes work. Regular diskette drives seek to more-or-less the right track by "dead reckoning." So if you write data with one drive the tracks will be be positioned slightly differently than if you write data with another drive.
That means your data is more likely to read correctly with the drive that wrote it, than with some other drive.
Worse, the formatting information is written at a different (earlier) time than the data, so if you format with one drive (or buy a preformatted diskette) and write to it with another, you end up with alignment mismatches, and unreliable reading on ANY drive.
Worse yet, Windows likes to write to the diskettes even when you don't tell it to do so, to update the "last accessed" fields in the directories. That means the most important part of the diskette (the directories) tends to get written to by many different drives, which means that the directories often become unreadable (though an LS-120 might be able to recover the data).
*_Pro tip #2:_* for maximum reliability you should format and write a diskette on the SAME drive, and then use the write-protect tab to prevent it from being written to by any other drive.
*_Plea for help:_* I have some 8" diskettes that I would love to recover data from, however the adhesive which sticks the oxide layer to the substrate has failed, so if I put them into my 8" Shugart diskette drive the oxide rubs off. So I'm afraid to even try to read the most important ones, since that would destroy any hope of ever recovering the data. Does anyone know how to read them?
I don't know if the Windows tools do similar, but, as a Linux user, I'd have tried doing the file-copy benchmarking using a tool for detecting counterfeit flash memory media named F3.
F3 works by filling every last accessible bit of the drive with data and then reading it back out to check for corruption, truncation, performance below the listed performance class, etc.
What makes F3 so suitable is:
1. The write and read are separate tools (f3_write and f3_read), so you can write the disk once, then read it back multiple times... optionally, on as many separate machines as you want to be absolutely certain about that cache situation.
2. Because counterfeit flash media may be perfectly good at storage and retrieval but lying about the performance class, both the writing and reading tools will give you a performance read-out. (eg. The very first USB flash stick I ever owned, a Lexar Jump Drive from the 2000s, returns "Writing speed: 679.51 KB/s" and "Reading speed: 833.53 KB/s".)
3. Most importantly, it doesn't care what kind of device you use it on. You just point it at a path, and it'll fill the drive that path sits on to capacity or, conversely, read out and verify the test files in that directory.
For a test, I slapped a random blank AT&T-branded 1.44M floppy into my favourite Chinese USB floppy drive (which looks like it's using the same housing as the Toshiba drive), reformatted it, ran `f3_write /media/ssokolow/454E-AD36`, ensured caches were flushed, and then ran `f3_read /media/ssokolow/454E-AD36`.
The result? "Reading speed: 35.59 KB/s"
Interestingly, the writing speed was more in line with your numbers on the Dell drive, despite my concerns that there might be some form of in-drive write caching that F3 might not be able to bypass, and what sounded like a retry for an iffy sector that didn't happen during the reading process:
"Writing speed: 32.35 KB/s"
As for raw image benchmarking, maybe use the DD port that come with Git for Windows?
On Linux, this command `dd iflag=sync if=/dev/sdg of=/dev/null`, produced this very suitable output:
1474560 bytes (1.5 MB, 1.4 MiB) copied, 40.2245 s, 36.7 kB/s
(I'm assuming `iflag=sync` is all I need. I normally use `ddrescue` for my raw disk reading and benchmark things using `hyperfine`, which is more oriented toward hot-cache benchmarking with statistical analysis. I don't normally have a need to benchmark cold-cache performance of hardware.)
I got the dell floppy drive awhile ago for my latitude d830 which I saved from the recycling centre. The bonus was it had a USB port which was amazing because I didn’t have to use it with dell’s proprietary D-bay.
I gotta say, I chuckled when you said 12 seconds was unacceptable. Like, I get where your coming from but I also remember both 1 hour photo and, before that, the dread of mailing it out to the photo lab. One week to 12 seconds in a couple decades.
I learned of the existence of more-than-one-speed FDD's, er, last week. And, as it happens, from a Mavica product picture. Sony still offers the manuals and such on their website, which is nice. Sooo, I got two Mavica's on the way now. :)
One other thing caught my attention, Sony made an adapter for Mavica, memory card-to-FDD. I wonder how quickly that reads.
I used to have a Sony mavica digital camera with a floppy drive in it.(circa 1998_2002)
You could even use those Memory Stick adapters in PCs' internal floppy drives, if you had drivers for them. (Which were probably never made for OSes after Windows XP.)
@@AaronOfMpls Oo, I wonder how XP deals with a floppy with more than floppy's worth of data...
@@Kumimono The limit would be 32 megabytes...due to the 12 bit FAT filesystem...it was actually a problem in the days of the Crusades in the late 1980s for 5-1/4 inch stepper motor hard drives...
I was a proud owner of the LS120 drive. It would put 120 Megs on a physically identical disk to a standard floppy just with higher density medium. And also read and wrote 1.44 meg floppies at increased speeds. I think it still exists in my storage, good luck finding media for it though. Thanks for another great Video.
We have those exact Dell drives at work at the antivirus scan stations, actually. Industrial environments still use them a bit. Older CNC tools have floppy drives for loading G-code and I've seen a few oscilloscopes with them as well.
I absolutely love you videos, it's been a good minute since I've found a channel i enjoy watching as much, nice long in depth videos just aren't made anymore like you make them and that's what I love most about them. Not afraid to get lost in needless detail, but also not so extreme with the IT speak that it can't be understood. Downright one of my favorite channels period
I believe the idea with that Dell floppy drive is to update a prior practice.
Many laptops from the late 90's (Mainly IBM and Toshiba from my experience) had an external floppy disk connector that you could use to plug in the floppy drive caddy with a dongle.
Dell decided "hey, we have a perfectly good universal port now, let's just use that!" and integrated it with the drive.
Even when it's plugged into the modular bay, it shows up as a USB floppy drive, so it just runs USB to that proprietary connector.
I found a (roughly) 2x floppy drive in a 386 luggable laptop so faster drives have been around for a while, but I don't think I saw another in a built PC even in custom fleet PCs built in the late 2000s 🤷♂️
The reason why mavicas were relevant for so long is because floppies were ubiquitous in most work environments as USB keys were still quite expensive and early drives had writes limited to 100,000 cycles in any block before bricking themselves. No one really cared about or even noticed the write speed at that point, but you could find a box of disks in almost any desk at that point. That was cheaper and far more convenient than having to wait for developing.
Developing and getting positive transparent images is the cup's best part of waking up.
Your one of the best speakers the world has to offer. Your videos give me life crd. Ty
Great little info video! Fornus who grew up with this technology, it's awesome to see what else was out there! I never had the mentality to pester my parents for the latest and the greatest.
And nice Project Farm shout-out :)
Gotta love Project Farm, he is indeed thorough with his tests, figures and spread sheets 😍
160KB capacity was specific to the Atari-8 bit computers and 5.25" drives, but for some reason it got mixed into the general floppy mythos. I do not blame you.
Acorn Computers did 100kB and 200kB on 5¼ inch. The 160kB was actually the 200kB media format, but IBM and others cut it down to 80% for reasons I've never understood. The 80% thing persisted, with 1.44MB & 2.88MB being 1.6MB & 3.2MB on Acorn.
I'm pretty sure IBM PC-XT could read and write 160kb too.
@@Murph9000 The reason is that you need more than just data, you need sector heads and blank spaces in between. 200kB (decimal) was the raw capacity assuming constant nominal speed and a standard number of tracks, just like 2MB (decimal) is the raw capacity of the 3.5" HD floppy. They could have gone for 180kB with smaller gaps, or even 192kB with sector interlacing or larger sectors, but probably kept it down for reliability (even though that was proven to be unnecessary). On your regular HD floppy, you can get 1.6 MB with tighter spacing alone, 1.68MB with interlacing (2 to 1), 1.76MB with larger sectors (1KiB) alone, or even 1.92MB with a combination of both (2 to 1 interlace with 2KiB sectors).
Earliest upload I've ever caught without notifications!
Whoever designed that DELL drive was absolutely brilliant to add that USB port to it, they really REALLY didn't have to, but did it anyway. They are also very reliable drives too !
And quite cheap because almost nobody knows about the USB party trick !
It's been -i think- 8 years since i last bought a USB floppy drive, it looks the same as many of the ones shown but its speed was exasperatingly slow. Less than 10kB/s and actually reading a floppy succesfully was a roll of the dice.
I don't remember my 1999 PC's floppy drive to be that slow!
towards the end of the tech quality took a dive. not only the drive, but the floppies themselves. you can get a pack of used floppies from the late 80s/early 90s and they still work perfectly fine, but a pack of new old stock from the early 2000s is a gamble.
5.25" are even more reliable.
Floppy drives made the best noises, fast or slow I miss those guys! Cheers for the vid.
Never "benched" it before, but this video got me thinking...
My go-to USB floppy is a TEAC FD-05UW, apparently this is a "2X" drive, reads a 1.44MB disk at about 50KB/s. Neat!
Your tests are best case. Imagine handling a hundred files randomly on the disk. The head jumping from track to track.
The Dell 620 was my first work computer. I was an engineer at a vehicle OEM and have many a fond memory of this thing. I wrote my wedding vows on it. Once, I sheered a 1000$ license dongle clean off the USB port and the port still worked. After I wore off the Ethernet port from years of continuous use, I got a USB Ethernet dongle to delay IT taking it away 😢
Couldn’t have made my day any better. It’s amazing all the improvements that sort of fell through the cracks
I've got the first mavica with optical zoom and the file sizes vary greatly depending on the brightness of the recorded picture. Love that camera. I really enjoyed this video. Yet again I need to go buy more stuff because of your video haha. Im the weirdo that still buys floppy disks and uses them weekly, almost daily.
I used to have one back in 1998-2002 and I loved it
LS120 drives like the wear in a way that launches the disks 5 feet on eject. Always entertaining, as there is no warning. You push the button, and a half second later, the disk hits you straight in the face at mach 3.
So your video got me to dig out my old USB floppy drive I used when I did tech support. I always thought it was weird at the time but now it gets even weirder. The drive in question is a QPS LKM-FK73-D, which is a rebadged Panasonic that shares the same model number. In addition it is maked as a 240mb super disk and according to the panasonic manual it can reformat 1.44 disks to 32mb with their included software. Also some old articles when this was new seem to claim read write speeds in the 600kbs range. No idea if that last part is true and I have no means to test it but thought you and your followers might like to know.
Project Farm~! That guy is amazing, and honestly you do just as in-depth of a review of something, but in a different style! Love both your and his channel! glad to see more people appreciate his content!
19:50 I am that one guy who had an LS-120. Internal, it was great - hooked up via PATA and replaced normal floppy drive - still read floppies but much faster. I loved it at the time
Going through school through the 00's, I don't recall ever noting floppies as particularly slow. I do recall the primary complaint we had at school and at home was the low amount of data storage compared to the incredibly expensive ($40USD for 256MB) flash drives at the time. I imagine we would have seen faster floppy drives much more often if they had ever really gotten large enough for their slow speeds to be truly tedious compared to the even greater tedium of archive splitting and disk swapping which always consumed even more time than read/write cycles.
I remember people at school taking advantage of the fragiliity of floppies to excuse themselves for missing work. Oops, the floppy got corrupted, tough luck!
Watched this on my E6420 that I absolutly love. The second best computer I've ever had (best was a wierd tablet PC with a flippable screen and a wonderful pen that was the bomb when editiong photos) and I have changed the keyboard twice (expendables) and the palmrest part once since it broke b y the fingerprint reader. It's my daily driver and have been for at least 9 years. It's slow by todays standards but still feel quick enough for me.
I use mine everyday as well, it's a great laptop!
I believe floppy disk drives were SOOOO a commodity that no one really thought that would be a good market "niche" to thrive.
Fun guess on the LS120 here! The read/write head is physically smaller in the LS120 drive (though the head carrier material that rides on the disc may be similarly sized), so it can lay out tiny tracks on the LS120 discs without overlapping. When it goes to read a 1.44mb disk, it just goes to a track, senses its huge track flux, and goes "yup that's zeroes and ones". Thus, reading is quick and easy.
But if it wrote out data to be compatible with that same 1.44mb drive, its much smaller head would write out a nearly invisible signal for the older drives with larger heads! So, it probably has to write each track 4 times (or more), seeking a split track forward each time, to lay out parallel flux spots that appear as one "big dot" to older drives.
Think "ballpoint pen vs. sharpie". How many lines would a ballpoint pen need to make to equal the width of a sharpie?
This is just a guess based on what I know about magnetic stuff, and how it likely works. I saw that segment on the LS120's slow write speeds and it immediately clicked. Hope it's mind fuel for anyone else curious as well!
I'm pretty sure LS-120 drives have a second wider write head for writing to normal floppies.
@@---li4yn Bang on! I just dug into it a bit, found a more recent teardown/deep-dive on it, and saw that the bottom side of an LS-120 disc actually seems to be optical! So of course a second set of heads must be present. That's wild. Ah well, that theory out the window.
I had both those dell laptops for work. I'll give them this, they survived working in a locomotive shops for decades.
Oh man.
I haven’t thought about floppies since, like, 1999.
This is fun.
your inclusions about other channels are super cool (but your original material is even better)
Greetings from Poland :)
Fun Fact, I have one of those SONY 2X Drives, and it usually comes with a black cover that has "SONY 2x FDD (2X SPEED FLOPPY DISK DRIVE) MPF88E-UA" on the cover.
Same here.
I love the length of your videos, nice stuff to listen to in the car.
I'm glad I'm not the only one who consumes a lot of RUclips content like that. I listen to way more videos than I watch. 😅
We were still creating and archiving these floppys up to when I quit film/tv archiving and vaulting in 2013. So many places still used floppys for Closed Captioning because it was a such and old, unchanged system at the time.
I have an LS120 drive that I used to archive all my 3.5" floppy disks. One of the selling points for me was that it would also read 720kB disks, which my USB floppy drive just won't do. It wouldn't read my single sided floppies though, but I managed to come up with another solution for that.
The insanity of a floppy disk camera with a USB port is amazing. The entire point of the Mavica was the floppy working in any computer. It truly defines a bridge product. By then I had a tiny 5MP Sony with a memory stick, weird times.
Yup, USB was still up-and-coming in the late 90s, and flash memory cards were still pretty expensive for the amount of storage they offered. Though Sony did offer a Memory Stick adapter for the floppy drive of later Mavicas. You could even use it in your PC's floppy drive if you had the special drivers the thing needed.
Hey, it's foone's avatar on the thumbnail!
Great video as always!
Hey man, this is probably the fourth video of yours I've stumbled across and I keep forgetting to subscribe. You've got a great casual tone and presentation style but with some solid info as well. I've remedied my error and added you to my subscribed channels. Thanks for doing what you do!
I never thought the sound of a floppy would make me soooo nostalgic 🤓
Love your content.
Just starting to get fascinated with old technology and the things that go along with it. Whenever we start having conventions again down here in portland id love to run into you potentially.
When I was a kid, around 1998 to 2000, my elementary school teacher had a ZIP drive sitting on his classroom's computer. It fascinated me. (this was in the middle of France, in the countryside, too)
Oh hey, the Fastcache! We had one in the work desktop my dad had around 2000, it gave me a very incorrect idea of how fast normal floppy drives were supposed to be as a kid. Every now and then when they would sell off parts and systems they were replacing he would come home with a weird treat like the floppy drive that didn't suck, the UPS that kinda did suck, or the early ergonomic peripherals his bosses didn't stick with long enough to actually give an honest attempt
Hey brother, i just wanted to say thank you for your videos. At night I like long form, calm videos that I can lay there and listen to and you are the master at this. You're descriptions are so detailed that you can close your eyes and really understand, follow and enjoy the script and I for one appreciate that. Don't get me wrong, or take this the wrong way because I watch your stuff during the day too, but I really do these long form, information rich, chill videos. Whats better than falling asleep and reaming of retro computers? amirite
My uncle still uses zip disks to back up an old offline work PC.. CDs definitely started to take over pretty fast and might be why we don't see floppy marketing. Instead of waiting a few seconds for a reliable megabyte.. With CD burners you now wait 2+ hours to test and burn only to fail to buffer under run, or media failure!! Yay!
Pretty damn neat, something that I've never had thought about but cool to learn about. Thanks for the video!
Last time i used a floppy disk, I had a usb drive connected to my Tesla to play some old school MP3’s.
26:02 CLEAR winner. I see what you did there! (I know it's just semi-translucent but it still counts to me at least)
At 19:02 I swear you were channeling my daily sentiments on most things.
The smallest capacity 3,5" floppy standard that I know of, is the one that came with the HP-150 (AKA the Touchscreen), which held 270 kB formatted capacity in a SS disk.
Hey, nice video. You might want to ditch stop watches for a linux console and the "time" command. Then you could easily do something like:
time sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/fdd
and have the entire floppy written full of zeros and getting the wall clock time presented in the end.
linux are helpfull to do this
How can you not acknowledge the amazing innuendo of pocket floppy? 😂
There was a development of the Floppy Drive known as Floptical drives, my memory is a little fuzzy here, but with specific floptical media the storage was over 100MB, silent and fast operation plus a few other benefits, and used the IDE interface. However, when using normal floppies, the usual noisy operation occurred but operated at around 2.5 times faster than a typical floppy drive.
I had one of these, it sat in a typical 3.5 inch floppy drive bay and other then a gold arrow on the facia and mechanical eject system (like the Apple floppy drives), you’d never know it was anything special.
I got mine as I replaced one for a customer and quickly realised it wasn’t a drive fault but user error with a report on a ‘faulty’ drive, but work said it had to go into the waste skip, which I appeared to do, but to prove the point out in in my toolkit. Installing it I’m my PC at home, I showed the drive was just fine and could go into spares stock but that was refused so it stayed in my system and gave me years of reliable use.
Shame you can’t get the media anymore ☹️
Man, the LS-120 really triggers my nostalgia. I didn't care if it wasn't as great as a Zip drive, it was my best friend during college. Everything was on a few LS-120 disks going back and forth with me daily.
These videos are joyful in sometimes inexplicable ways I love it
Thanks CRD for another great video that even though was on a topic I originally didn't care much about, as the video went on I became more and more interested and highly entertained.
Loving this channel more and more and everyday. Thanks for all the hard work for the sake of our entertainment!
The most impressive feat of accelerating floppy read times I ever saw was Lucasarts’ Koronis Rift on the C64. Anyone who’s had the pleasure of owning a Commodore C1541 5.25” floppy drive will know how leisurely they were, frequently being beaten by tape turbo-loaders, and their only saving grace being random access compared to tapes. Koronis Rift was startling at the time as rather than waiting minutes during loading you’d hear an unexpected and rapid succession of clicks from the drive and then boom, ready to play. My guess was some early compression or someone had written a custom drive routine but whatever it was it was unlike any other loading experience on the C1541.
I had a SCSI LS120 I kept around for data recovery. An LS120 + ddrescue would turn an overnight job into a 1h job. There was a period in the early 2000's where everyone was racing to save their data as their decade-old FDD's went bad and that drive made me a ton of money.
Fin fact: Just recently, as of 2022. The Japanese government has started making the move from using floppies to store Government records and other documents. And going more into Solid State Drives and other means of electronic storage.
So as much as the public moved onto using other forms of storage. Governments kept using the form. Right until until the end of time, so to speak.
I had a parallel port LS120 back in the day. I bought one the first time I saw it in 1997. It saved me a bunch of time installing software from floppies. I was a network engineer and I would setup Novell servers for companies and I would have to install office, or wordperfect on the the server from a big stack of floppies. I also had to constantly load updates for insurance companies that came of floppies sometimes there would be 25 or 30 disks. I used the crap out of that LS120. I still have one today. It's a USB one, and it still works, but i don't use it very often.
Fun fact - many japanese laws still require government officials to use floppy drives as data storage. Just now Japan started to clean up laws from obsolete media references.
I had an LS120 drive in the 90s. The computer lab at my school had machines with LS120 drives and it was a great way to download stuff there and bring it home.
360/400kB 5¼” 80 track double sided drives were a thing. The smallest I have personally experienced was 80/100kB 40 track single sided 5¼ inch, which was actually a common format for software distribution in the 400kB market to ensure all drives could read them.
Nothing in this video surprised me until you pulled out that Sony Mavica DSLR. I just imagine the use case scenario that caused that to be made. "Help, Sony, my 640480 pictures aren't clear enough!"
It's actually a conventional digital camera design, it's just big because of the media - and takes pics at something like 1600x1200!
@@CathodeRayDude Wow, man, that is ridiculously awesome! I take it it only shoots JPEGs, huh? How many full size and quality pictures can a floppy hold, if you don't mind my asking?
My dad used to use an LS-120 for backup when they first came out. He used that same drive, which he still has, although his current work computer can no longer use it, and it still works. It was an internal ATA drive. I seem to remember it writing to regular floppies much faster than a normal floppy drive, maybe 2x, and reading from regular floppies even faster yet, maybe 4x. Reading and writing to SuperDisks (as they were marketed), was about the same as CRD found, which, in the late 90's was awesome. This sped up backup times immensely. Originally, in the 80's, he would backup to around a half-dozen 5.25" floppies. By the mid-90's, he switched to 3.5" floppies, which were bigger and faster. But, his business was growing, and so the backups took more and more disks. By the late 90's, he was using around a dozen floppies for his backups. This would take around fifteen minutes of staring at the computer, waiting. When he switched to LS-120 disks, it went down to a single disk, that only took around a minute to backup to.
I bought an IDE LS120 drive about 6 years ago specifically for the fast floppy disk functionality. It was new old stock and I even got an IDE to SATA connector so I could use it in my modern PC. It worked great for the task and then I put it away when all my floppies were imaged and haven't touched it since.
thank you for giving me a new appreciation of my dear FD100
I wasn't excited about the last video, but this one definitely earned my sub. nice job. I agree with your initial preponderance of whether or not anyone had ever made a faster 3.5 inch floppy drive. Excellent info. Nicely done. New sub.
In the late 90's I interned at an insurance company while in High School. in their lab they had a disk duplicator that came pretty close to your 4x numbers if memory serves and it was fun loading that machine up with a whole stack of disks and watching it write to a disk, spit it out into a bin and then insert the next disk and repeat the cycle. The device connected to a desktop pc and ran proprietary software that ran the disk duplicator. I remember being amazed at how fast it could read and write disks and wondering why the heck "normal" floppy drives were so slow.
The disk/controller/software used to format the floppy could also wildly affect the read/write speed. I'm not sure if older stuff used sector interleave on PC floppies, but it would slow the reading of such disk on later hardware. And the normal sector order is actually ineffective when you read consecutive sectors en masse. What you need is a floppy formatted with so-called "sector sliding", where after reading one track and moving the head to the next, you don't have to wait while disk rotates for the first sector of the next track. The tool I've used in the 90s for this was fdformat. And while few years ago there was very little info about this on the internet aside from the tool itself in some old software archives, now the author uploaded the original source code and documentation to github! very cool.
I used to have an ATA LS120 and loved it. Less clutter in the desk, one less bay used in the computer, and it did everything I wanted it too. I can't vouch for the floppy write speeds as I primarily wrote to LS120 disks, but it was fast enough and reliable enough for me. I actually still wish I had it sometimes. And yes, I had a compatible motherboard which allowed me to boot off it.
Protip: Look for the Dell K9699. This is the internal floppy drive used in some of their older Optiplex line. While it isn't USB, it is a standard laptop drive in a adapter to mount it into a 3.5" drive bay. Now, some external USB drives can be gutted to reveal a standard laptop form factor drive inside. Replace the Optiplex drive with that, buy a USB header>socket adapter and BOOM, you get a internal mount, USB connected floppy drive.
If you want an ATA version of the LS-120 ... you already have it. The USB version is just an ATA internal drive packaged in external casing with a USB-ATA adapter. There's a couple of variations of the external drive that can be identified by the interface connector on the casing: if it has a standard USB B socket, then the USB-ATA adapter is inside the casing; if its a proprietary connector, then the USB-ATA adapter is part of the cable. Either way - its fairly simple (and non-destructive) to open the casing, retrieve the bare drive unit, and chuck it in a PC (and to reverse the procedure to restore the drive to its original condition)
Awesome video! I've always loved how quick the drives in the Mavicas are, it feels painful copying whole disks of images back with a standard speed drive, I very much need to get me a faster external drive!
Great video! Very happy to keep supporting you on patreon :)