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 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
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.
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.
Back when I was a youngin... my techie/ham radio grandpa convinced me that ZIP drives were called that because when ejected them the spring was so strong it would "Zip" across the room, followed by a demonstration of his drive doing just that. I believed that definition for YEARS.
Well, the Sony PSP would shoot the UMD across the room if you caused torsion on the consoles housing just right. There's a sizeable number of SD card slot 'Guns" that can be made to shoot the SD card across the room...it stops being fun when they bring out the MicroSD card rifle...
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.)
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
How do you only have 80k subscribers? This production value-- these low-level, in-depth explanations written to bring the viewer into your yarn and have them on the edge of their seat like they're in another era, seeing these amazing technologies with a glitter in their eyes looking towards the future that they could only imagine, and that we now live in. I'm glad that you appreciate these 'archaic' technologies, and see them for the value they had in the world they ruled. Edit: "Yes, it sounds cool as hell" best quote ever
That's RUclips for you. All the attention goes to the people with exaggerated reaction image thumbnails, talking animated avatars instead of their real selves, annoying gimmicks like speeding up and slowing down the audio. Unfortunately people like CRD who present things like a normal human being get overlooked.
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.
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.
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!
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’m immediately intrigued. I don’t actually have anything that can read floppies, nor do I have many of them, but still. I’m basically trying to live vicariously through retro RUclipsrs to make up for the fact I don’t have the space for a collection of my own.
@@benholroyd5221 And yes, a 128 GB SD card can hold as much AM radio as one male erection...yes 4 hours of *EVERTHING* AM using the RTL-SDR...the files take up about 25 gigabytes per hour...if you were listening to a certain station on that file and something interesting happened on a different station, you could -get this- REWIND THE RADIO and listen what to that other station was broadcasting at the exact same time that you were listing to the first station...
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"
The laptop floppy drith with the USB on its side - we had one exactly like this at work, when the only oscilloscope we had available was an old Tektronix TDS520. The only viable way to take screenshots is to store it on floppy on its built-in drive, then transfer the images to a PC with the USB floppy
We still have a piece of equipment at work that uses floppies. It's an HP Semiconductor Parameter Analyzer (HP 4156A). These things are basically multiple precision 4 quadrant power supplies with measurement capability (source measurement unit is the proper name) with a computer to control what they do. Basically, it's a modern curve tracer. They are not cheap, even used and quite old. And a floppy is the best way to get screenshots and data on and off the thing (might be able to use GPIB and it has an ethernet port, but who knows about actually talking to it or getting it on a corporate network). Of course nobody's computer has had a floppy drive in many years, so we use USB floppy drives.
I have a LeCroy LC584 1GHz oscilloscope that even though it's 20 years old, it's still relevant today and uses a old 3.5 floppy drive. Luckily, I was able to use an IEEE-488 computer interface to transfer files with because using the floppy really SUCKS!
The 584 will do 2Gs/s when input channels are combined. So yes, in four channel mode it's a 250MHz scope, but it is capable of 1GHz in single channel mode.
The biggest take away from this video for me was that I had one of those Dell floppy drives and had NO IDEA that it had a usb port on the side (because why would you even look for that?!). I don't even have a laptop to shove it in, it was literally just e-waste for me and now I have a perfectly usable usb floppy drive! Thanks for that!!
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.
Compaq sold LS120 as a workstation option. Their implementation was very good. Fast and easy to use with no FDD. The users didnt even know they had it. Support could come in behind and image. The whole drive with a floppy (ls120) .. It was sad that zip beat them out. ... That drive was IDE by the way.
I think they're more useful these days, there's still adapters to fit them in newer desktops. It's been a lifesaver for things outside of DOS/Windows, I use one in my PM G4 and it works great in OSX
@@amirpourghoureiyan1637 If you get the sequel, LS240, you can image 32MB on one floppy, as long as it's of decent quality. So you could theoretically get a backup of your home folder on external media for 99 cents.
I can tell you a few things from my corner of the world about this and my experience as one of the last floppy users. Some users I knew, myself included, were actually leery of 2X & 4X drives up until the end, because we'd been soured by things the early ones did. Reduced disk cache, omitting a parity-check routine, even running the disk too fast and damaging either the spindle or the platter were common in anything that advertised itself on speed. So if I look at a floppy drive and I see an emphasis on speed over accuracy, I'm going to go the other way. That's why they go out of their way to hide it, because it's a mark of shame - write accuracy and disk longevity were always the name of the game. When we come to the LS120, or as I called the serial one I had, The Disk Muncher - because that's what it did. Anything that wasn't either a brand-new disk or LS120 media, it overspun and did major damage to the disk when it did any I/O operation. Obviously, this was not good. Later models of the drive weren't as bad, but would still reduce the life span of floppies. When you're talking pure data preservation, obviously you're less likely to care if you can read it a second time or if you can go back and forth safely - you only read from 0 to whatever., When you use it for a game which has regular operations and uses the disk for graphics, audio, and state data, the way the drive interacts with the disk matters a lot, and one bad spin leads to a dead disk. I know that LS120 media & drives were good for techs though (that's why we had the drive actually), because with the speed you noted, setting up new PC images was a lot faster - a handful of LS120 disks could take the place of a briefcase full of standard floppies, so you would just copy your Norton Ghost image from the disks to the machine in no time, and be done with the matter. Hence the need for an option to boot from serial LS120 in various types of BIOS at the time. It was definitely not the linear upgrade path you're thinking it to be. Plus, on top of all those issues, the drives and media might have been made cheaply, but they were not cheap to buy. In the era where a good, reliable floppy drive from a known brand could be found for $10 (less at a show), there was just no reason for many users to move over to a more expensive drive with newer, more expensive media just because programmers have forgotten what the world "optimization" means. That's just what I know, though, and the world may say differently.
@@AltimaNEO Well you were right because I don't even see a disc drive on laptops anymore. I think high capacity floppy disks are the future because they would fit perfectly in a laptop.
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
Even the slowest version of USB 1.0 was faster than 100 KB/s. 1.5 mbps (megabits per second) translates to 1,500 kbps (kilobits per second) which translates to 187.5 KB/s (kilobytes per second). Also, USB 1.0 wasn't very successful, but of the computers that included it, I doubt any of them restricted it to the slower of the two speeds it supported (the other speed being 12 mbps, same as USB 1.1). On top of that, the laptop he's using is a Dell Latitude E6420, which is from 2012 and has USB 3.0 (3.0 was introduced in 2008).
You are hands down my favorite tech channel. You always seem to make a video on a topic that i have recently found interest in or on components i just picked up and are packed full of info while remaining engaging.
24:01 if that massive clunk wasn't an indication of that drive being in piss-poor health (like so many LS120 drives are by now) then idk what is. These drives should _never_ make clunks like that. Think of it like the LS120 drives' equivalent of the ZIP100 click of death, or a precursor to it. The sounds the drive made with a LS120 floppy inserted also didn't quite sound right, and the read/write speeds seemed pretty damn poor overall. Not sure if that's just down to the USB interface or not, since literally all LS120 drives I have are internal IDE ones (like what's probably hiding inside that external case)
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.
The transition from floppies to CD, ZIP, thumb drives was a wild time. I remember the hype around the super disk, then it was just gone. SD cards were stupid expensive and slower than ZIP drives so I could see why they took hold when they did. Hell, we used tape drives for a while and I hated how long it took to get through 3/4 of a tape to pull the last thing you saved. It was so much easier to just snag the files needed over a LAN (at least in that workspace). It makes one wonder how many millions of dollars were spent during that time.
Yes I remember moving straight from floppy and Walkman to an MP3 player that mounted as a mass storage device. I could listen to music for days without charging. And my phone lasted for days as well. Remember when progress made things better?
@@benholroyd5221 Alas, it was only temporary. I stuck with cassette for several years after CDs just because I couldn't afford an in-dash one for my car or my house... Plus I had a pretty nice record collection and made those sweet, sweet mix tapes folks get all nostalgic for.
@@MrVolksbeetle From the late 90s on, I used a portable CD player with 60-second anti-skip and a tape deck adapter. Worked great in the 80s-90s cars I had. My current car (early 2000s) has an in-dash CD player _and_ a tape deck in a proprietary-shaped radio module -- but no aux jack. So I still listen to CDs a lot in the car, and use a tape adapter with my phone.
In like early 2013 we still used floppies at work. Some machines weren't networked for security reasons, and those machines were quite old. The only way to get data on and off them was per floppy. Which was weird to me at the time, because at that point I was using an mp3 player for at least 5 years that simply mounted as mass storage device and even came with an SD card slot.
@@AaronOfMpls I had invested quite a bit in cassettes, and I wasn't prepared to sacrifice the quality of the medium on an adapter. (well, at least the deck in my car didn't play nice with the couple that I tried) As it was, I was content with making tapes from the records and then CD's that I had amassed. In the present day, I've switched to practically all digital. Spent a couple weekends ripping my CD collection to my laptop then transferring them to my iPhone. I lucked out and got a nice deal on a head unit for my truck that works well with USB and Bluetooth. I have an older iPod that I keep in the glove box connected through USB and I can use the Bluetooth to access the tracks on my phone if I wish. It works pretty well and I'm OK with what I've got. It would be awesome if I'd thought about keeping all of my tape and record gear. Unfortunately, I didn't have the means to store them properly and had to let them go.
The last time I used floppy disks is kind of interesting. I did backup software for a company's virtual machine center. There were several hundred customer virtual machines in the center and to restore their machine, you needed the secret code to decrypt their online backups. It didn't seem to be a good idea to have these in an ASCII file where some jerk could steal them, so we wrote the software to read the code from a floppy disk. Each customer's backup decrypt code was on an individual floppy disk locked up in a room with an access code, so you had to go in there, flip through the floppies like looking for a book in an old library, and stick the floppy into your machine before starting the restore. Even now it still seems like a fairly secure method.
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
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.
"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.
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.
i had a ATA LS120 drive. its was VERY fast. a lot faster than the usb version. it was and still is the greatest for imaging/reading files. i did not go for the LS240 later on, i spent the money on a plextor burner.
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!!
Here's a data point on early 3.5" floppy capacity: the HP 150 PC introduced in 1982-1983ish was one of the first computers, if not the first, to use the 3.5" floppy format. The base drive option was the HP 9121, which used single-sided, double-density drives made by Sony that could only store 270K.
Oh wow, I gotta look into that. Opinions are mixed on what the *first* machine was - some people say the SMC-70 but it seems too refined, so I wouldn't be surprised if they really did OEM it first.
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.
DUDE! the SMC 70 was an amazing computer! I used one for several years in television broadcasting, and LOVED the CP/M OS! The keyer and genlock was excellent with that computer!
Hey, it's great to hear from someone with experience! The one I have doesn't seem to have any capabilities other than an extremely rudimentary titler, and it's obvious the hardware is capable of far, far more than that. Do you remember what software you had and what it was capable of? If you know anyone who might still have the manuals that would be even better. No big deal if not, I just gotta try, haha. Thanks for watching!
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 😍
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.
@@IanTesterI wondered about this recently after noticing that 720 kiB IBM formatted disks took about twice as long to image using a Greaseweazle than Amiga disks. Does the IBM format also use interleaving, requiring two revolutions to read an entire track?
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.
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!
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 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...
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I do remember being quite surprised when I bought an old Macintosh Quadra 650 to run A/UX and found that the floppy drive in the Quadra was about 5 times as fast as the floppy drive in the much newer AMD K6-2 Compaq machine that I was using at the time.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.)
Yooo, I have a d620 too! I really wish modern laptops would have the modular hotswap things like that, but sadly I don't think that's possible considering the components barely fit nowadays.
Oh yeah, I also have that same Toshiba USB floppy drive lol. I've been carrying it in my laptop bag for a few years now, because who knows when you might need to read a 3.5" floppy.
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.
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.
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!
Heh - my daily driver is a Latitude almost identical to the second one you pulled out (E6430 - it's one louder!), and that drive bay is one of the reasons I've stuck with it. (It's also upgraded about to its limit, which is why I can get away with it.)
@@CathodeRayDude Completely agree. It's probably my favorite of the computers I've owned, and it'll be a sad day when it finally can't keep up anymore.
@24:36 “Listen to the big dog run” 😂🙌 You’ve answered so many questions I never would have asked. Hope floppy drive speed pops up at trivia night so I can flex!
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.
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!
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 last used one in 2000 and I consider my (at the time) 12yo self a slightly above average pc user. We had CD-R in our house early on. We also had broadband cable in 2001 and WiFi in early 2002. 🤷
my school had these dell laptops and i never knew that the optical drives in them could be swapped for floppy drives so easily! learning something new every day
Going fast on read is easier than going fast on write. See, if you can vary the speed and you read too fast, you will notice that as you get read errors (the CRC of a sector does not match the read data) and then you can simply decrease the speed until all read errors are gone. That way you can always read at the maximum speed a disk can still handle. Yet when writing, you won't know if the data has been written correctly without verifying it (reading it back in again). Always verifying would kill your speed for sure but without that you cannot tell at what speed you are going too fast for the disk. So it makes sense to always write with a safe speed.
2 years later, rewatching my own video, I suddenly realized that I might have an explanation for something. Why is the LS 120 drive so slow at writing ordinary floppies? Well, in order to achieve the massively increased track density required to fit 120 megs in the same space that once fit only 1.4, the LS120 head must be very very very narrow, much narrower than the head on a normal 3.5 in drive, and that means that when it writes data, it creates a magnetic track much thinner than a typical 1.4 meg disc would have. And we have actually seen this happen before, so we know what problems it causes. When 1.2 megabyte, 5.25-in drives came out in the mid '80s, while they could read the original 360K discs with no trouble, they could not reliably write them. That is to say, writing a 360K format disk in a 1.2 meg drive would produce a disc that would read reliably in 1.2 meg drives, where the track width and head with match, but actual 360K drives would often fail to read them because the magnetic domain is so much weaker than they expect. So if the LS120 had a hope in hell of producing discs that could be read on a normal drive, it would have had to write the track, then step over a fraction of a track with and write the exact same data again, and repeat four or five times, or maybe more, until it had produced something equivalent to the original magnetic recording. Since the rotational speed of the disc is fixed, then it's going to take six or 10 extra revolutions to write each track.
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!
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 !
I was _waiting_ for him to whip out a USB LS120. That was my floppy drive of choice in 2000; mainly because I discovered that a few of the PCs at university had those magical internal drives; oddly not replacing the 1.44MB internal drives. The only thing cooler than the seek sound is how it makes the sound -- the head mechanism vibrates back and forth in a butterfly motion as it locks onto the datastream. I only ever had one LS120 diskette, because those things were expensive and 120MB was more than enough capacity for me at the time; but boy could it haul ass when reading and writing regular floppies.
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.
*_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?
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
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.
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.
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!
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!
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 ☹️
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 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
@@fenniieee 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
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.
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. :)
Back when I was a youngin... my techie/ham radio grandpa convinced me that ZIP drives were called that because when ejected them the spring was so strong it would "Zip" across the room, followed by a demonstration of his drive doing just that. I believed that definition for YEARS.
That's awesome!
Well, the Sony PSP would shoot the UMD across the room if you caused torsion on the consoles housing just right. There's a sizeable number of SD card slot 'Guns" that can be made to shoot the SD card across the room...it stops being fun when they bring out the MicroSD card rifle...
I mean he had a point
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.)
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
How do you only have 80k subscribers? This production value-- these low-level, in-depth explanations written to bring the viewer into your yarn and have them on the edge of their seat like they're in another era, seeing these amazing technologies with a glitter in their eyes looking towards the future that they could only imagine, and that we now live in. I'm glad that you appreciate these 'archaic' technologies, and see them for the value they had in the world they ruled.
Edit:
"Yes, it sounds cool as hell" best quote ever
Takes a while to grow a channel, but he's doing a great job and he'll definitely get there
That's RUclips for you. All the attention goes to the people with exaggerated reaction image thumbnails, talking animated avatars instead of their real selves, annoying gimmicks like speeding up and slowing down the audio.
Unfortunately people like CRD who present things like a normal human being get overlooked.
@@jonleibow3604 You may be suffering from capitalism there.
@@brentfisher902 no, more like suffering from "the algorithm"
@@brentfisher902
Don't blame the guy, blame YT/Google for imposing the incentives that they do. They are the wanton capitalists here.
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.
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.
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!
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’m immediately intrigued. I don’t actually have anything that can read floppies, nor do I have many of them, but still. I’m basically trying to live vicariously through retro RUclipsrs to make up for the fact I don’t have the space for a collection of my own.
Just get an SD card. You could store quite a few floppies on one of those.
@@benholroyd5221 boring :p
@@benholroyd5221 It's shape is basically a copy of the 3.5" disk anyways, wish they made a noise like them too!
@@benholroyd5221 And yes, a 128 GB SD card can hold as much AM radio as one male erection...yes 4 hours of *EVERTHING* AM using the RTL-SDR...the files take up about 25 gigabytes per hour...if you were listening to a certain station on that file and something interesting happened on a different station, you could -get this- REWIND THE RADIO and listen what to that other station was broadcasting at the exact same time that you were listing to the first station...
When I first found this video it was just neat.
Now I have a Mavica FD75 and it's actually a useful reference guide
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.
The laptop floppy drith with the USB on its side - we had one exactly like this at work, when the only oscilloscope we had available was an old Tektronix TDS520. The only viable way to take screenshots is to store it on floppy on its built-in drive, then transfer the images to a PC with the USB floppy
We still have a piece of equipment at work that uses floppies. It's an HP Semiconductor Parameter Analyzer (HP 4156A). These things are basically multiple precision 4 quadrant power supplies with measurement capability (source measurement unit is the proper name) with a computer to control what they do. Basically, it's a modern curve tracer. They are not cheap, even used and quite old. And a floppy is the best way to get screenshots and data on and off the thing (might be able to use GPIB and it has an ethernet port, but who knows about actually talking to it or getting it on a corporate network). Of course nobody's computer has had a floppy drive in many years, so we use USB floppy drives.
I have a LeCroy LC584 1GHz oscilloscope that even though it's 20 years old, it's still relevant today and uses a old 3.5 floppy drive. Luckily, I was able to use an IEEE-488 computer interface to transfer files with because using the floppy really SUCKS!
@@appliedengineering4001 Pedantic fuck here, hi. Surely you mean 1GS/s? Weren't those like 200MHz bw?
@@aziztcf Oh no! It's 1GHz bandwidth with 8GS/s rate.
The 584 will do 2Gs/s when input channels are combined. So yes, in four channel mode it's a 250MHz scope, but it is capable of 1GHz in single channel mode.
The biggest take away from this video for me was that I had one of those Dell floppy drives and had NO IDEA that it had a usb port on the side (because why would you even look for that?!). I don't even have a laptop to shove it in, it was literally just e-waste for me and now I have a perfectly usable usb floppy drive! Thanks for that!!
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.
Compaq sold LS120 as a workstation option. Their implementation was very good. Fast and easy to use with no FDD. The users didnt even know they had it. Support could come in behind and image. The whole drive with a floppy (ls120) .. It was sad that zip beat them out. ... That drive was IDE by the way.
I think they're more useful these days, there's still adapters to fit them in newer desktops. It's been a lifesaver for things outside of DOS/Windows, I use one in my PM G4 and it works great in OSX
@@amirpourghoureiyan1637 If you get the sequel, LS240, you can image 32MB on one floppy, as long as it's of decent quality. So you could theoretically get a backup of your home folder on external media for 99 cents.
I can tell you a few things from my corner of the world about this and my experience as one of the last floppy users.
Some users I knew, myself included, were actually leery of 2X & 4X drives up until the end, because we'd been soured by things the early ones did. Reduced disk cache, omitting a parity-check routine, even running the disk too fast and damaging either the spindle or the platter were common in anything that advertised itself on speed. So if I look at a floppy drive and I see an emphasis on speed over accuracy, I'm going to go the other way. That's why they go out of their way to hide it, because it's a mark of shame - write accuracy and disk longevity were always the name of the game.
When we come to the LS120, or as I called the serial one I had, The Disk Muncher - because that's what it did. Anything that wasn't either a brand-new disk or LS120 media, it overspun and did major damage to the disk when it did any I/O operation. Obviously, this was not good. Later models of the drive weren't as bad, but would still reduce the life span of floppies. When you're talking pure data preservation, obviously you're less likely to care if you can read it a second time or if you can go back and forth safely - you only read from 0 to whatever., When you use it for a game which has regular operations and uses the disk for graphics, audio, and state data, the way the drive interacts with the disk matters a lot, and one bad spin leads to a dead disk. I know that LS120 media & drives were good for techs though (that's why we had the drive actually), because with the speed you noted, setting up new PC images was a lot faster - a handful of LS120 disks could take the place of a briefcase full of standard floppies, so you would just copy your Norton Ghost image from the disks to the machine in no time, and be done with the matter. Hence the need for an option to boot from serial LS120 in various types of BIOS at the time. It was definitely not the linear upgrade path you're thinking it to be. Plus, on top of all those issues, the drives and media might have been made cheaply, but they were not cheap to buy. In the era where a good, reliable floppy drive from a known brand could be found for $10 (less at a show), there was just no reason for many users to move over to a more expensive drive with newer, more expensive media just because programmers have forgotten what the world "optimization" means.
That's just what I know, though, and the world may say differently.
Yes, I had forgotten about that. People, myself included, were always a bit skittish of high speed drives, since they were error prone!
Why use a 4X when IOmega had faster, denser Zip drives?
Pin this OP
@@elephystry make him
@@AltimaNEO Well you were right because I don't even see a disc drive on laptops anymore. I think high capacity floppy disks are the future because they would fit perfectly in a laptop.
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
For the faster drives, you might be running into USB1 speed limits - hence the getting 100kb/s once.
Even the slowest version of USB 1.0 was faster than 100 KB/s. 1.5 mbps (megabits per second) translates to 1,500 kbps (kilobits per second) which translates to 187.5 KB/s (kilobytes per second). Also, USB 1.0 wasn't very successful, but of the computers that included it, I doubt any of them restricted it to the slower of the two speeds it supported (the other speed being 12 mbps, same as USB 1.1). On top of that, the laptop he's using is a Dell Latitude E6420, which is from 2012 and has USB 3.0 (3.0 was introduced in 2008).
You are hands down my favorite tech channel. You always seem to make a video on a topic that i have recently found interest in or on components i just picked up and are packed full of info while remaining engaging.
I save my GPT logs on floppies. It's a .... VERY weird feeling.
24:01 if that massive clunk wasn't an indication of that drive being in piss-poor health (like so many LS120 drives are by now) then idk what is. These drives should _never_ make clunks like that. Think of it like the LS120 drives' equivalent of the ZIP100 click of death, or a precursor to it. The sounds the drive made with a LS120 floppy inserted also didn't quite sound right, and the read/write speeds seemed pretty damn poor overall. Not sure if that's just down to the USB interface or not, since literally all LS120 drives I have are internal IDE ones (like what's probably hiding inside that external case)
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.
The transition from floppies to CD, ZIP, thumb drives was a wild time. I remember the hype around the super disk, then it was just gone. SD cards were stupid expensive and slower than ZIP drives so I could see why they took hold when they did. Hell, we used tape drives for a while and I hated how long it took to get through 3/4 of a tape to pull the last thing you saved. It was so much easier to just snag the files needed over a LAN (at least in that workspace). It makes one wonder how many millions of dollars were spent during that time.
Yes I remember moving straight from floppy and Walkman to an MP3 player that mounted as a mass storage device.
I could listen to music for days without charging. And my phone lasted for days as well. Remember when progress made things better?
@@benholroyd5221 Alas, it was only temporary. I stuck with cassette for several years after CDs just because I couldn't afford an in-dash one for my car or my house... Plus I had a pretty nice record collection and made those sweet, sweet mix tapes folks get all nostalgic for.
@@MrVolksbeetle From the late 90s on, I used a portable CD player with 60-second anti-skip and a tape deck adapter. Worked great in the 80s-90s cars I had.
My current car (early 2000s) has an in-dash CD player _and_ a tape deck in a proprietary-shaped radio module -- but no aux jack. So I still listen to CDs a lot in the car, and use a tape adapter with my phone.
In like early 2013 we still used floppies at work. Some machines weren't networked for security reasons, and those machines were quite old. The only way to get data on and off them was per floppy. Which was weird to me at the time, because at that point I was using an mp3 player for at least 5 years that simply mounted as mass storage device and even came with an SD card slot.
@@AaronOfMpls I had invested quite a bit in cassettes, and I wasn't prepared to sacrifice the quality of the medium on an adapter. (well, at least the deck in my car didn't play nice with the couple that I tried) As it was, I was content with making tapes from the records and then CD's that I had amassed. In the present day, I've switched to practically all digital. Spent a couple weekends ripping my CD collection to my laptop then transferring them to my iPhone. I lucked out and got a nice deal on a head unit for my truck that works well with USB and Bluetooth. I have an older iPod that I keep in the glove box connected through USB and I can use the Bluetooth to access the tracks on my phone if I wish. It works pretty well and I'm OK with what I've got. It would be awesome if I'd thought about keeping all of my tape and record gear. Unfortunately, I didn't have the means to store them properly and had to let them go.
The last time I used floppy disks is kind of interesting. I did backup software for a company's virtual machine center. There were several hundred customer virtual machines in the center and to restore their machine, you needed the secret code to decrypt their online backups. It didn't seem to be a good idea to have these in an ASCII file where some jerk could steal them, so we wrote the software to read the code from a floppy disk. Each customer's backup decrypt code was on an individual floppy disk locked up in a room with an access code, so you had to go in there, flip through the floppies like looking for a book in an old library, and stick the floppy into your machine before starting the restore. Even now it still seems like a fairly secure method.
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
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.
"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.
6:50 nice shoutout. One of the best testing channels, all demonstration and results with no fluff.
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.
Couldn’t have made my day any better. It’s amazing all the improvements that sort of fell through the cracks
i had a ATA LS120 drive. its was VERY fast. a lot faster than the usb version. it was and still is the greatest for imaging/reading files. i did not go for the LS240 later on, i spent the money on a plextor burner.
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!!
Here's a data point on early 3.5" floppy capacity: the HP 150 PC introduced in 1982-1983ish was one of the first computers, if not the first, to use the 3.5" floppy format. The base drive option was the HP 9121, which used single-sided, double-density drives made by Sony that could only store 270K.
Oh wow, I gotta look into that. Opinions are mixed on what the *first* machine was - some people say the SMC-70 but it seems too refined, so I wouldn't be surprised if they really did OEM it first.
@@CathodeRayDude The early, single sided 3.5 disks in that Sony machine were only 35 tracks!
@@CathodeRayDude Actually SMC-70 was before that. But the first products that used them were the Sony Series 35 word processors.
I had successfully forgotten the HP 150... thanks 😕
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.
DUDE! the SMC 70 was an amazing computer! I used one for several years in television broadcasting, and LOVED the CP/M OS! The keyer and genlock was excellent with that computer!
Hey, it's great to hear from someone with experience! The one I have doesn't seem to have any capabilities other than an extremely rudimentary titler, and it's obvious the hardware is capable of far, far more than that. Do you remember what software you had and what it was capable of? If you know anyone who might still have the manuals that would be even better. No big deal if not, I just gotta try, haha. Thanks for watching!
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 😍
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.
@@IanTesterI wondered about this recently after noticing that 720 kiB IBM formatted disks took about twice as long to image using a Greaseweazle than Amiga disks. Does the IBM format also use interleaving, requiring two revolutions to read an entire track?
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
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.
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!
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.
Earliest upload I've ever caught without notifications!
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...
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.
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.
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. 😅
Love the Project Farm reference. We're gonna test that.
Your one of the best speakers the world has to offer. Your videos give me life crd. Ty
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!
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.
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.
Dude you are so great at explaining all this stuff ! Besides LGR you are my favourite tech youtuber by far!
I do remember being quite surprised when I bought an old Macintosh Quadra 650 to run A/UX and found that the floppy drive in the Quadra was about 5 times as fast as the floppy drive in the much newer AMD K6-2 Compaq machine that I was using at the time.
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.
I never thought the sound of a floppy would make me soooo nostalgic 🤓
Love your content.
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.
These videos are joyful in sometimes inexplicable ways I love it
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).
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.
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
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.)
Yooo, I have a d620 too! I really wish modern laptops would have the modular hotswap things like that, but sadly I don't think that's possible considering the components barely fit nowadays.
Oh yeah, I also have that same Toshiba USB floppy drive lol. I've been carrying it in my laptop bag for a few years now, because who knows when you might need to read a 3.5" floppy.
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.
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!
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!
Heh - my daily driver is a Latitude almost identical to the second one you pulled out (E6430 - it's one louder!), and that drive bay is one of the reasons I've stuck with it. (It's also upgraded about to its limit, which is why I can get away with it.)
Those last couple generations of latitudes were such good machines and we're so lucky that they haven't been completely outpaced by the world yet.
A friend of mine and I use a similar Latitude for tuning the ECU on his 1993 Acura Integra :)
@@CathodeRayDude Completely agree. It's probably my favorite of the computers I've owned, and it'll be a sad day when it finally can't keep up anymore.
@@Carstuff111 It's a good laptop to have in a garage. Love the metal construction.
@24:36 “Listen to the big dog run” 😂🙌
You’ve answered so many questions I never would have asked. Hope floppy drive speed pops up at trivia night so I can flex!
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.
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!
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 think it's less about the time it takes to have your picture and more about the time that you're unable to shoot a new picture
@ True, and this is still an issue even with modern cameras (and always will be with long exposure )
2:31 I always forget that we were still using floppies into the mid-2000s. Seems weird there was a time when Wi-Fi and floppy disks co-existed
I last used one in 2000 and I consider my (at the time) 12yo self a slightly above average pc user. We had CD-R in our house early on. We also had broadband cable in 2001 and WiFi in early 2002. 🤷
Back in the 90’s, I ran my first website on my dial up connection, with the site on a floppy disk. Robotech fan site
my school had these dell laptops and i never knew that the optical drives in them could be swapped for floppy drives so easily! learning something new every day
Going fast on read is easier than going fast on write. See, if you can vary the speed and you read too fast, you will notice that as you get read errors (the CRC of a sector does not match the read data) and then you can simply decrease the speed until all read errors are gone. That way you can always read at the maximum speed a disk can still handle. Yet when writing, you won't know if the data has been written correctly without verifying it (reading it back in again). Always verifying would kill your speed for sure but without that you cannot tell at what speed you are going too fast for the disk. So it makes sense to always write with a safe speed.
Oh man.
I haven’t thought about floppies since, like, 1999.
This is fun.
2 years later, rewatching my own video, I suddenly realized that I might have an explanation for something. Why is the LS 120 drive so slow at writing ordinary floppies? Well, in order to achieve the massively increased track density required to fit 120 megs in the same space that once fit only 1.4, the LS120 head must be very very very narrow, much narrower than the head on a normal 3.5 in drive, and that means that when it writes data, it creates a magnetic track much thinner than a typical 1.4 meg disc would have. And we have actually seen this happen before, so we know what problems it causes. When 1.2 megabyte, 5.25-in drives came out in the mid '80s, while they could read the original 360K discs with no trouble, they could not reliably write them. That is to say, writing a 360K format disk in a 1.2 meg drive would produce a disc that would read reliably in 1.2 meg drives, where the track width and head with match, but actual 360K drives would often fail to read them because the magnetic domain is so much weaker than they expect. So if the LS120 had a hope in hell of producing discs that could be read on a normal drive, it would have had to write the track, then step over a fraction of a track with and write the exact same data again, and repeat four or five times, or maybe more, until it had produced something equivalent to the original magnetic recording. Since the rotational speed of the disc is fixed, then it's going to take six or 10 extra revolutions to write each track.
Came for the thumbnail, stayed for the floppy goodness 🔥
your inclusions about other channels are super cool (but your original material is even better)
Greetings from Poland :)
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!
If the floppy format hadn't died out but continued to evolve and be refined, would we see terabyte-sized floppy disks today?
Pretty damn neat, something that I've never had thought about but cool to learn about. Thanks for the video!
Had my Dell D620 in front of me and you just showed me how to pull that out.
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 !
Floppy drives made the best noises, fast or slow I miss those guys! Cheers for the vid.
I was _waiting_ for him to whip out a USB LS120. That was my floppy drive of choice in 2000; mainly because I discovered that a few of the PCs at university had those magical internal drives; oddly not replacing the 1.44MB internal drives.
The only thing cooler than the seek sound is how it makes the sound -- the head mechanism vibrates back and forth in a butterfly motion as it locks onto the datastream.
I only ever had one LS120 diskette, because those things were expensive and 120MB was more than enough capacity for me at the time; but boy could it haul ass when reading and writing regular floppies.
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.
*_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?
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
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.
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.
Great video! Very happy to keep supporting you on patreon :)
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!
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!
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 ☹️
Your content is amazing. Your channel is gonna grow fast!
Nice was hoping for an upload on my day off... Thank u for the killa content :)