A 120MB Super Disk -- Floptical Disk | Nostalgia Nerd
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 20 авг 2024
- Old technology, don't you just love it. There was a time when floppy disk was king. Indeed for many, it remains so. But there was also a time when 120MB of data, even 240MB of data could be squeezed on a humble 3.5" floppy disk. This is a relaxing look at that very medium; The SuperDisk LS120 and LS240, floptical disk drives. A range designed by 3M to go head to head with Iomega's ZIP drive and achieve the title of Floppy Disk: The Next Generation.
Also, if you're unsure what the difference between MiB and MB is take a look at simple.wikiped...
** For exclusive videos, mystery boxes and other rewards, please consider supporting me at; / nostalgianerd **
☟Sharing☟
If you wish to share this video in forums, social media, on your website, *please do so*! It helps tremendously with the channel!
☟Subcribe☟
www.youtube.co...
✊Support Me! ✊
*Patreon*: www.patreon.co...
Visit my eBay Shop: ebay.to/1QQpYyy
Buy via. my Amazon affiliate link: nnerd.me/MGOI
★Join me on Social Media★
Twitter: / nostalnerd
Face: / nostalnerd
Instagram: / nostalgianerd
Web: www.nostalgiane...
★Equipment★
Lumix G6 with Vario 14-42mm Lens
Nikon D3200 with 40mm Macro
Corel Video Studio Ultimate 2018
Corel Paint Shop Pro 2018
Blue Snowball Microphone
♜Resources♜
More info on the SuperDisk;
en.wikipedia.o...
www.informit.co...
If you believe I have forgotten to attribute anything in this video, please let me know, so I can add the source in. It takes time to make these videos and therefore it can be easy to forget things or make a mistake.
I should note that Imation was a spin-off company of 3M, rather than a brand..... also....
I always associate DOS with FAT16, but ~as some have correctly pointed out~ floppies are formatted with FAT12.
The Mebibytes point is a reference to hard drive manufacturers deviously using base 10 (especially these days).
Floppies don't technically hold 1.44MB...BUT that's how we commonly refer to them.
THIS IS SUPPOSED TO BE RELAXING.
Nostalgia Nerd cool vid, could you please make some vids on old phones like HP IPAQ etc.?
Yes I will. But I can't tell you exactly when.
Nostalgia Nerd Also is it a good deal to buy Atari 2600 for 30$?
I don't know how much they sell for in the US tbh. But they seem to be going up in price.
iOmega is pronounced "Eye-Omega"
I tried calling it a “Super Floppy” once... She wasn’t convinced 😕
Points for effort :)
But did you offer her some vertical action?
"Isn't it erotic almost"
[SCENE CUTS]
[He's back] A quick reboot...
HUGLAHUAGAHLAGHUAGH!
3:17 Fun fact: “3M” originally stood for “Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing”.
a now it's made in China.
MAGA
@@JohnnyCagePro Keep the political bullshit out of here
@@JohnnyCagePro there are 3M factories in the US. fraking moron.
Prydzen fraking
@@mewtwonick1024 censorship
Pish tosh! Lest you forget the mighty 2.88 MB Extended Density 3½" diskette? Supported by many IBM PS/2 models, some ThinkPads, and a few clones...
Ahhhh yes. Worthy of it's own video, no less.
please
A disk extender? Are they those silicone strap-ons??
My NeXT Cube has an internal 2.88 MB ED drive which will happily work with other densities as well. You can still pick up fresh ED diskettes on eBay from time to time.
ED disks were a niche in themselves, everyone with an Amiga or Atari ST has used DD disks and all PC users at some point have used HD disks but I've never met anyone who used ED disks.
120MB? We are truly living in the future.
Welcome fren.
Um, Arcade, that amount was a fairly big deal for floppy disks back in those days, 20 years ago.
Um, Aaron, these ARE floppy disks.
When I bought my first 120MB HDD ppl though I was crazy, and was told "you could put every program you could ever want on there and never fill it up"
My statement was only half sarcastic for those who were wondering. I actually do have an appreciation for this tech.
I have a working LS 120 drive. It's one of the newer ones you showed with a USB adapter. I use it to mount 3.5" floppies on modern Macs. Works like a charm!
"Floptical" is one of my new favorite words! Right behind "plumbiferous", go look that one up!
I actually found one of these disks at a local thrift stores moving sale and had to grab it even though I had no real use for it (along with a zip disk and an 8 gig tape cartridge). I've had NO idea what this thing was or where it came from for a year or so (wikipedia at the time didn't tell me much and I was just too lazy to do anything more lol), so this video is exactly what I've been looking for. Thanks man!
USB did not replace ZIP, rewritable CD did. In 2004 one could get a rewritable CD-drive for 33 € in Finland. Disks were 50 cents apiece or about 70 c / GB. Flash was still over 200 €/GB. Five years later flash was 2.50 € / GB (Now it is 20 c/GB)
Okaro X for large files or large numbers of files CD-R/RW was definitely they way people typically went after Zip faded in popularity. For smaller files, say about 60 mb worth or less, I used an early version the USB flash drive, 60mb version as a replacement for floppies when transporting files between machines. Unfortunately Win98 did not support USB mass storage out of the box so it needed a driver installed, but Mac OS did around OS 8 or 9 in the late 90s, so it worked out of the box. That was more convenient for smaller data amount since you could more easily write or modify the contents on them vs a CD-RW and carry it around via a neck lanyard or on a keychain. Early USB flash drives where somewhat costly at like around $1 per MB in the U.S. in the early 2000s (if I recall correctly) while CD-RW was much cheaper at like less hen a penny per megabyte, but less convenient.
In the US, CD Burners hit about $300 in 1999. It was SCSI and you had to have a SCSI controller but it worked. Blank discs were $1.00 or less. That was the end for Zip and anything smaller than a CD. USB thumbdrives didn't become common for another several years. Then DVD burners came out. Eventually Blu Ray burners. I have one but almost never use it. Everything is MicroSD now. Worked with 80gb on an SD card last night. Fast and flawless. Amazing evolution.
240mb discs work with 120mb unit drive?
Zip continued to have enough success to sell millions of units all the way through the CD era up until the mid 2000s when usb came along and cut drastically into their remaining profits.
People massively over estimate how successful CD was as a storage system for consumers - it actually wasn't. Consumers used it for larger back ups of their whole system but for everyday use? CD didn't have much impact on the everyday storage market. It was seen more as a WORM format than a viable replacement for floppies and zips.
Wow I've been into computers for a long time now (over 20 years) and this is the first time I heard the term mebibyte as well as the acronym MiB which i previously knew as Men In Black. It's true, you learn something new everyday! Your video mentioned zip drives which i remember well but there was also the Jazz Drive and the disks could hold 2 gigabytes. Imagine that, 2 whole gigs! Will wonders never cease?
Glad to see my old LS120 live on through the medium of the internet - shame it didn't work very well in the end :( I recall the parallel drivers being a pain hence resorting to having it installed as an internal IDE drive when it was still in use back in the day. Thanks for showcasing it, otherwise it would have been another obsolete relic of data storage consigned to a well known auction site ;) Thanks also for the donation to charity :)
Ah yes, my favorite storage brand: eye-ah-magha.
I love you Nerd, never change.
240mb discs work with 120mb unit drive?
Thank you. Very calming.
"The beautiful process of applying a fresh label"
Until that moment when you realized you put it on askew.
You tried to take it off, but it was already partially glued, so it ripped in half.
You then desperately tried to remove it with your fingernail, one tiny bit at a time, taking extra care not to damage the floppy in the process.
Not my fondest computing memories.
Also static electricity/weight of the label itself which makes you stick the corner of the label in the middle of the disk or something like that.
I just used a sharpie instead :P
Fear not this has been replaced with the application of screen protectors on smartphones
Back in 2000 when I started working in the States, Zip drive from iomega was still the preferred backup media for individual workstations at most big companies in south florida. A Zip drive unit provided 100Mb and used to cost a whooping $200 and included one(1) 100MB Zip cartridge. Additional Zip cartridges were $20 each at office depot or office max. I remember that because as an IT worker, I was responsible of backups automatization which needed to be done manually sometimes for each workstation and was also in charge of IT supply purchases. I'm feeling old! lol
Always wanted to see one of these in action, well now I kinda did.
Thank you for sharing your experience!
We actually had these when I was in high school-they were used as external floppy drives for our iMacs.
Did they work well with Mac OS?
I just love how the ZIP drive propels itself forward while ejecting a disk. Astonishing :)
I always pronounced "iomega" as "eye-oh-mega", this is the first time I heard someone say it as "uh-yo-mugga"
Joseph Lucas You are correct. He mispronounced it.
No, that's not the pronunciation guide. Using words in place of phonemes doesn't work, because, for example, the word "eye" is pronounced as "i (long)," NOT as "eye," because to say it's pronounced as "eye" is to mean "ee * yee." In a pronunciation key, there are no silent letters!
I had a lot of dealing with Iomega back in the day, and they pronounced it "eye-oh-mega" I think i'll go with how the company that made the name up said it.
ee-oh-mega
No, Roller, it's a long i sound, as the _word_ "I" or "eye." (The pronunciation key for the whole name would have an i with the symbol for long vowel over it, then a break, then a long o, as in the word "oh," then a break, and then an m with basically a long a, and then the next break, and then a g with a schwa right after it, or "guh.")
I had one of these for the expansion bay of my Powerbook G3. They were pretty handy. I chose this over zip because it could also use regular floppies, which I needed for school.
I can remember using one of these LS-120's for forever on my Amiga 1200 Tower setup - basically as an easy way to get 1.44 MB disk compatibility!
I had an internal LS120 drive, and found it pretty useful. Never had a problem using it. Used it as my floppy drive, and also as an LS120 drive - initially using the disc it came with, and eventually tracking down a second, once that was getting full. Of course, I never met anyone else who had one, so it was never used for copying files across to different computers via disk.
I've always love the artistic touch to these nostalgic video you do, keep up the good work!
Great episode bud :) though Ron Jeremy will probably be looking for that music back I'd say!!
I don't think I've ever heard Iomega pronounced that way
eye-oh-migga
Funky britts always have to mispronounce shit.
*ahem* I mean, you don't hear me complaining about all the English words pronounced differently in America. Mainly because I don't give a rat's a**
Nostalgia Nerd *arse
It's a company name, not aluminum-vs-aluminium. It's pronounced "eye omega". There's a techtuber (a Kiwi) who consistently pronounces the company name "Adobe" with two syllables - ah-DOBE - instead of the correct ah-DOE-bee. You're okay with that?
You did a great job of applying that label there, nice and straight, no air bubbles.
I recently bought a NOS super disk 120 usb drive. I owned Iomega zip and Jaz drives while in university 20 years ago and barely remember the superdisk drives. I was just happy about the Zip disks larger capacity than a regular floppy. Back then there were no could storage, not usb thumb drives nor 400+ GB and cards like today. While the campus was networked, living off campus and relying on modem access made network sharing unpractical. I lugged around a caddy with zip then jaz drives for a couple years in my backpack. Those were different days. We take soo much for granted today.
I had two of these in the day but they are amazingly unreliable drives. The main advantage of them is that the LS drive would read standard HD disks faster than a standard drive.
I have a LS drive but lost the super diskette
Sometimes the LS-120 would also read floppies that had been written by a drive that was a little bit out of alignment, when most normal drives would not. I kept it around for the better part of a decade specifically to read marginal floppy disks.
Shame. I had a IOmega tape drive and it was also amazingly unreliable. The data may be readable for a day or two but that's about it.
They don't advertise it as an 125MB disk because ( 125,958,144 bytes / 1024 ) / 1024 = 120 MB. So, just as advertised. Great video by the way!
Thanks!... and yes indeed. It's more a reference to how hard drive manufacturers get away with using base 10, especially these days.
I mean, it's pretty dry.
RetroGameCouch Right most will stretch the truth about there memory capacity and especially thier MAh Capacity.
Technically, the 1024 factor would mean it's MiB … Mebibyte. So it's ~126 MB or 120 MiB.
I don't think "MebiByte" was a thing when this floppy drive was released, so MegaByte still would have meant 1024 bytes... And still does as far as i'm concerned. MebiByte sounds so ridiculous as well.
You're right, the LS-120 drive was released in 1997, the binary SI prefixes were established in 1998. But still, not so far apart.
I remember my superdisk, actually still have it some where around here. I loved the thing, at the time I had a CD-WORM, Tape Drive and then this bad boy that I loved dearly. The superdisk at the time was my go to for all of my storage needs. Of course at the time all I had was a creative labs 56k v.90 modem so I didn't exactly have the wealth of data that I have now....how I miss those good ol' days!
That reboot animation in the video at 5:30 scared me as I tough it came from my own monitor so I paused the video and went to make sure the cables were properly fixed, then I went back few seconds in the video and noticed it was a fake animation.
That's a perfect troll move xD
Something like this could've been really useful when I was still copying games from my friend's computers using 1001 floppies.
me and my friends only went as far as doom and some 11 floppies. after that, we'd just take our HDDs out and install on the other machine, copy everything we wanted and then get the hdd back. i remember how even copying a game installation this way saved time as opposed to installing from a cd (10 minutes for 600mb vs half an hour)
@@GraveUypo I was way too afraid to even look inside the thing to have even thought about that.
Back then, computers exploded when you did something wrong.
Well, not literally but anyhoo... You did something wrong, goodbye motherboard or some other component in your PC.
those were the good ol days
@@mvvagner Only thing good about those days were consoles, games and lack of feminism in the internet.
“Isn’t that the ‘save’ icon?”
LMAO!
I find it weirdly satisfying to listen to a calm voice talking about a broken technological relic from the past in the evening...
Thank you sir for your glorious contributions to all of us computer computer nerds and enthusiasts personally I greatly appreciate all of your effort that you put into these videos I've been following your channel for a while now I'm happy that we have such people like you out there to preserve and show off the history of how we got to today
Floptical.... You just made that up right?!
Someone did. But not me.
I had one. Can confirm it was marketed with that very silly name. It didn't work very well back then, either.
The ironic thing is that there is nothing floppy about these disk or drives anymore.
Well it's more floppy than a HDD how I love internal storage
Don't coptical that floptical disk.
I remember seeing one of these drives internally on a computer years ago - I really liked the motorised eject mechanism and tried to find a floppy drive with that and never could. Wasn't until years later I realised it must have been a superdisk drive.
unless it was a Mac, as they almost always had the motorized eject system, IIRC they used Sony drives.
I had one of these when I went to the Art Institute back in 1997. Ended up having to get a zip drive because I was sick of the hassle of not all the computers in the computer lab recognizing it.
I had LS drives and disks. I love them. Put them on a IDE cable, replace the slow and ancient floppydrives and on you go. Never had problems with them. Also they read normal floppy´s faster, and that compatibility was what imo made them so wonderful. There were also SCSI versions of those drives.
Until I bought a second hand Imation external one, that also features in the video. That one was broken. It looked cool, like the small all in one Mac´s at that time. I swapped the drive that was inside with one I had and it worked. Really cool times.
Man, those must have failed bad, i never even heard of those, and i was alive and gaming with PC's back then.
I changed my comment... they failed bad hahaha
I had one. They were really crappy.
I can remember them being advertised in PC Shopper Magazine, but never knew s a single person who owned one, as they where harder to get ahold of, and Iomega Zip 100 disk drives eventually fell in price, and I picked up one of those in Parallel port for my school work in high school to use in my Computer Network Technologies Class.
Edit: Zip disk where so popular for a time, that Gateway had the option of including internal Zip disk, and no floppies, and even had BIOS that could boot from Zip. I know because my aunt at the time bought a very rare GateWay AMD 1 Ghz Thunderbird model, with it being only one of 2 models(the other an 800Mhz variant, but otherwise the same system) at that point in time Gateway had made using AMD chips, and it was damn fast with Win 98SE.
Yup, Iomega's Zip Drive did everything Super Disk could do, but better (higher density, faster read/write speed, much more physically resilient disks, and prolly the most important, much higher drive & disk reliability, etc etc...) which pretty much dominated this "transitory" 3.5" floppy ---> optical media + NAND flash market period.
This remained the case until the latter had reached sufficient sizes/prices to meet the needs of the small storage market (specifically in the form of flash memory cards ala Compact Flash & SD, as well as the increasingly popular USB thumbsticks from USB 2.0's introduction onwards), and the former (specfically CD-R/RW's & the burner drives needed to use them) become cheap & convenient enough for the larger storage markets, until inevitably being superseded by USB devices as well (i.e. external HDD's), and then finally the internet ofc (all of which would end up rapidly killing off most all of these transitory technologies [Super Disk, Zip Disk, etc...] and many of the associated companies too).
Jason Yanes, Like I said there was the option, all the experience I ever had with Zip drives where external models 2 100MB Parallel port(first one had the click of death), and 1 200MB USB drive I found at a Salvation Army store in the mid 00's that a little after a year also ended up with the click of death.
have i been saying "IO-mega" wrong all these years?
You probably shouldn't take pronunciation advice from me. I've heard it pronounced all sorts of ways, but this rolls off the tongue better.
No you have not.
I think NN has become notorious in the comments section for being corrected by people, for incorrectly pronouncing words/names wrong.
i wasnt trying to correct him, i genuinely thought I was saying it wrong..
I meant that if you ever hear him saying a word differently to how you say it, then NN's version is probably wrong and not yours lol.
I read about Super Disk all the time in various PC magazines, but never managed to ever even see one in person. Zip was ubiquitous at that point.
I an LS-120 drive in the very late 90s when I was at uni. I used to cycle from my (non internet-connected) dorm room to the uni building a mile or so away with the drive and LS-120 disks in my backpack. Then I'd plug it into the lab computers and download all the latest MP3s I could could get at blazing JANET speeds. Happy memories. I think it was an Iomega brand; it wasn't quite as compact as this one but it had a passthrough port right alongside the parallel port.
You are missing out on the most important advantages...
LS-120 drives were natively supported by most motherboard BIOS after 1997, and still are to this day. Supported as a bootable drive.
It also came in an internal IDE version.
Do not argue about external Parallel vs. SCSI speeds, instead just crack open that external enclosure and mount it internally, even replacing your A: floppy.
The same was true for non-parallel ZIP in those days, not sure about more recent BIOSs.
yes internal LS-120 drive with appropriate support by the OS and motherboard used was the way to go. No doubts at all. Parallel devices besides printers were just frustrating. Scanners were annoying also. The enhanced modes that got added to the LPT interface made things worse. The days before USB.. Anyhow for LS120 the great shame is that it wasn't widely adopted. If all those new PC's being sold had an LS-120 rather than a floppy drive.. Things would have been differerent.
I had an internal install super disk drive. Worked great but very short lived media, as CD-R discs got cheap as chips soon after.
Ahh this brings back memories of some of my methods of data storage in the late 90s. I was under 10 at the time. Had both an old Apple Color Classic and a IIsi. Both these machines had a built in SCSI port on the back. Well i had managed to get a hold of a few old 50pin SCSI hard drives ranging from 40MB upto 250MB from various old computers. Then had a 50pin ribbon cable with a bunch of SCSI connectors on it. And a 50pin centronix connector. Then a 50pin to 25pin SCSI cable (the macs had the 25pin same as a printer port connector for scsi) A long with a old AT Power supply. Just had the whole lot siting on my desk with no case or anything. Im pretty sure i had about 2GB on the macs by the end of it all.
I can remember taking a hard drive, the cable and PSU to school several times aswell. And copying games off the school PCs. (my school was all mac) Once again all just in a cardboard box with no proper case. I cant imagine a kid being allowed to take a bundle of wires to school these days full stop. Let alone start plugging stuff like that into school PCs.
Back in the day I would see certain motherboard BIOS with the boot option of LS120 but never really knew what it was about... I’m glad I finally caught this because it literally answered a question I’ve had for almost 20 years now...
Mebibytes didn't exist in the time LS-120 was around... Heck, harddrive manufacturers didn't even cheat on stating the capacities of their drives by calling a thousand KB a Megabyte...
Sebastian Bemrose in my memory, I seem to remember that they did report RAW capacity of the drive rather than formatted capacity. Although it is technically correct, I do remember feeling a bit cheated still back in the day.
Yeah, that is very true: I always chalked it up to formatting losses...
Still it feels a lot less like being lied to than the mebi-cheats...
I had used a couple of these drives back in the day, they seemed to be extremely unreliable.
Me too, I then found out why most ppl were using CD-R as the rw disks were temperamental too.
In one of the pcs I built, many years ago, I fitted an internal LS120 drive, it worked great, I don't remember any problems reading discs, not LS120 or floppy. I still have the drive and it still worked when I bought an IDE adapter and tried it out last year.This video has got me thingking, I will stick it into an older system box I have, if it has an IDE connector inside, might as well make use of the drive.
Man, this brings back memories. When I started highschool (and thus, became free tech support for them), they invested in a lab of first-gen iMacs. None of these came with floppy disc drives, and USB flash drives weren't a thing. So along with each Mac was a gigantic SuperDisk drive, connected by USB. I've never held an actual SuperDisk, though, as we only used them for regular floppies.
Very funny you make this video today, when I was just storing some bank documents on a Zip 250 disk that's encrypted with Bitlocker, on Windows 10, via the internal drive in my machine. Haha, still using these old formats.
I hope they're not important documents!
I have a few 100s sitting around in bins still - an internal IDE version, and external USB and parallel versions. I've long since offloaded all the contents onto less fragile media.
In my years of using the Zip drive, the only ones I ever encountered issues with, the power to the house went out, they never recovered. My later drives have a sort of "foam cushion" for the heads to slam into when power is lost, and never exhibited nasty clicks. I still yet to even run into a faulty disk.. After the lawsuit the design was changed to prevent head slamming and "soften the blow" and it worked. Early designs even had it, they thought they could just get away with it though, literally.
Wow, that's definitely security through obscurity. The average data thief likely wouldn't be able to read anything on the disk even if it weren't encrypted to begin with! ;)
Windows 98 is the most sexy OS
Ohhhh yeahhhhh behbeiiii
I always like ME
XP though...
It's a dominatrix.
That welcome music tho.. nostalgia... :3
My gramma, who was an early adopter of digital cameras for her photography, was a big fan of Super Disks. We used to tease each other because I had a ZIP drive on my old G3 PowerMac. But at the end of the day, we both used CD-RWs to share our respective art back and forth when I lived on the opposite side of the country from her.
This sums up the installation experience of everything from the mid 90s to the mid 00s nothing worked as it should, compatibility problems etc.
Of course they use "Mebibytes", the device is from 1997(ish). The IEC didn't invent the word "mebibyte" until December 1998! Before that there was no separate word set for the 1024-based unit system, "megabyte" usually meant 1048576 bytes. Even today, the non-IEC-compliant use of the "kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte" word set for 1024-based units continues in common usage. Partly because "mebi, kibi, etc." sounds very silly when spoken.
On a related note, a "1.44MB" floppy disk does NOT hold either 1.44MB or 1.44MiB. It's 1474560 bytes; ~1.47MB or ~1.41MiB. The "1.44" number comes from mixing units; using a 1000-based "Megabyte" with 1024-based "Kilobytes".
Yes indeedy. Many thanks for your precision. It was more a reference to how modern hard drive manufacturers don't and therefore disks sound larger than they can actually store.
And yet, it showed up as 1.38 MB on Windows...
Wow, enough for 4 songs. :O
Or 200 if you used the format of the era: MOD/S3M/IT (tracker) music.
Stop using FLAC, especially if you only have Soundblaster 8bit output.
Onboard has 24 bit studio quality. :P
That beautiful "CRT off" transition at 5:29!
I remember getting a pc back in 2000/1 with an ls120 as its floppy drive. As an 11 year old kid the thought of a 120mb disk was exciting to say the least. The joys of classic computing.
So, in short... "floptical" was a flop. ;)
HI, here is a penguin 🐧
Thanks, I really appreciate it.
🐧"Well hello"
lol nice comment - here is a red balloon just for you
🎈
Linux propaganda!
R.I.P Pingu
I remember when my dad installed a zip drive in our home shared computer and bought some 100mb and 250mb disks. It was a life changer!
I worked for a small educational software company back in the dark ages. 5.25 floppies for IBM and Apple machines. Rarely 3.5" floppy for Mac, and those ps2s. All the labeling was done by hand and 99% on order, we warehoused no stock. We'd get an order, for example, a science GED pack. We scurried off to dozens of shelves groaning under the weight of hundreds of rolls of disk labels. The most efficient way was to stick the labels you'd need (memorize that catalog!) to your arm, fingers, hands, as many as you could.
So, kids, if sometime in the 90s you got a Queue Software diskette with a wee bit of human hair sticking out from the edge. It was probably mine!
We Also did 99% of the copying 1:1 in the computer types the were ordered for. A master disk (replaced as needed) and the fresh, hairy, blanks. A basic format bootable, then copy a: -> b: when done start over. We ran in circles changing disks, pulling and returning masters. It was fucking hysterical!
Your pronunciation of Iomega was bizarre. I've always heard it pronounced "eye-omega". Your pronunciation was more like "aiyeoh-miggah".
You know what a dialect is, do you?
1996 called: It wants its slow crap back XD
You have no idea how fast those things were compared to what they replaced (tapes). Of course by that year CDROMs were becoming the main media format for PC...
Actually i know how slow they were :) I'm just fooling around, pretty amazing tech for that time period :)
I bought two zip drives and one failed the first hour. We couldn't find our receipt, so we had to buy a THIRD drive just so we would have a receipt, in order to return the second one. Okay, that was sneaky, but it was a significant investment, and the failure was not our fault. All good wishes!
At the same time Maxell was trying to sell Superdisc drives they were also manufacturing blank Zip 100mb discs. Many times they were discounted and sold cheaper than Iomega's own discs. Great video!
'eyomugu' 😂😂 never heard it pronounced that way. Here, it was always 'Eye Owe Mega'.
Welcome to the other side.
And God said “Let there be cheap flash” and he saw that floppy’s sucked
This died long before cheap flash. I'm thinking the CD-R had a hand in its failure.
Yeah, these came and went in the late 90s. However, the earliest USB drives (brands like DiskOnKey) hit the market around 2000 with capacities of a whopping 8MB, so there was still a need for portable rewritable storage that wasn't CD-RW. I remember seeing a mention of a 32MB model in MaximumPC for an ungodly amount of money. They were really only good for a DOC file or Doom game saves back then. To say nothing of how freaking slow USB1 was.
Old enough to remember floppies, and had a computer that accepted them until 2006!..... But much happier with my more modern, chicklet sized 32 GB USB....yep.
I remember schools that had mac's that used floppy disks still. When apple removed the floppy disk drive on their new iMac G3 in 1998, these were everywhere as I don't think usb thumb drives were around yet.
I remember wanting an LS120 drive back in the day... kind of glad I never got one :P
Awesome! I had an Internal LS-120 as writable CD-ROM drives were just WAY too expensive back then. I thought mine was a Sony but maybe I'm mistaken. That was like 20 years ago. Anyway I think at one point I had like 20 disk and several boxes of standard 1.44 floppies. I used mine a LOT for backing up all my "media" that I had back then. I also loved how it could read my standard 1.44mb floppies 7x faster. Part of me misses those days. Bummer the one you had, had problems. Looks like it had certainly seen better days.
Great video as always! Cheers from California, USA!
This video brought back so many memories, both good and bad. I still remember the first time I saw a ZIP drive back in 1996. Remember the GUI of Windows 3.11. Remember how often Windows 95 would crash. All the time spent waiting for a system with only 8 MB or RAM and a slow hard drive to reboot. How "plug and play" more often than not was "plug and pray". I'm so happy so much have improved since.
I always preferred the SuperDisk to the ZipDisk because i liked that it was a simple upgrade with backwards compatibility rather than an entirely new type of drive, it just felt neater and cleaner to me, especially because at the time we all knew whichever format you chose it was only going to be a stopgap untill optical media prices came down. I liked the fact that the SuperDisk drive just sat unassumingly in place of my standard floppy drive perfectly happy to work with existing media but also support this fantastic new high capacity storage media, also because i did my projects on SuperDisk meant i got to use the few far superior Dell PCs at school which had the drives as standard
I always like seeing stories about technologies that were created and released almost like the day before something 1000 times better came along and this is a prime example.
Thumbs up for the sexy smooth jazz music. Suitable for boudoir, bedroom, and applying fresh labels to discs!
I used an internal one for a while years ago, it was when I was using Win XP, and it worked great, I still have a tonne of disks, in the end I backed up the data to CD, before another of those old computers ceased to work. It was great it also began to get difficult to buy more disks and they were not cheap to buy.
Still have the drive and a box full of empty used disks in my garage.
I do have some fond memories of this medium. It was towards the end of portable magnetic medium just before RW CD's came down into affordable price ranges. I was one of the proponents of LS120 over Zip100 right up until both became obsolete.
Great video. Despite being an avid reader of practically every PC magazine from around that time,I never heard of this. And you can beat a fresh label... with this video.
The SuperDisk was a really good format for my 1998 laptop. The laptop drives were as compact as the regular 3.5" floppy, and IIRC could read/write a standard floppy so I always had the SuperDisk installed. I never had any problems with the LS120 laptop drives or the disks. A couple years later I tried to install some second-hand SCSI SuperDisk drives on my desktop machine, which basically look like what you extracted from that stand-alone case, but those drives were not reliable like my laptop drive had been. This video caught my eye this evening because I just pulled out a stack of my backup media, which includes a few SuperDisks from my 20 year old laptop that I'd love to be able to dig into. :D
LS-120 could be found on many IBM Thinkpad laptops back in the day. I remember mine in my old Thinkpad 600. Never has a single issue with it. It was pretty great.
Finally, a floppy disk for all 120 MB that I need!
Superdisk gained a quick burst of life when the iMac came out. The iMac was the first mainstream computer to not include a floppy disk drive. Fortunately, USB Superdisk drives were available on-launch to allow Mac users to access their existing floppies, and some iMac users also took advantage of the 120meg Superdisks.
However, Iomega also had a USB Zip drive available at the time of the iMac launch, and Mac-using professionals were already big adopters of Zip. The Zip drives even had good USB Mac drivers from the get-go, whereas a lot of hardware manufacturers struggled to get their USB devices to work with Apple's grumpy USB stack. In the end, Iomega won the iMac market, but I think it was reasonably close for a while.
The PC's I had when these were the new hotness usually had motherboards with a BIOS that allowed you to set the LS-120 as the A: drive and this was PII/K6-2 era stuff.
The sounds the drive you had there was making were definitely the sounds of a broken drive.
I actually still have 2 model LKM-F733-1 (Matsushita bezel-less) LS-120 drives new in their anti-static bags and a bunch of disks. I need to get them out and hook them up with an IDE to USB adapter and test them out...
240mb discs work with 120mb unit drive?
I never got any 240MB disks to try. I don't believe they were backward compatible though. The LS-240 only saw release in Australia and Asia and was backward compatible. Neither could read Sony Hi-FD disks though.
Remember a PC had one of these fitted internally to one of the office PC's when I had a job as an it support engineer, I think it was added to increase the profit on the PC from the seller as it was supplied with no high capacity disks and nobody in the office even knew it was a high capacity unit :)
I had a couple of these back in the day. The internal IDE model was supported on my ASUS motherboard natively. So I could assign it the drive letter A and did not need additional drivers under Windows XP Pro. I also had an internal Zip drive, but it was much noisier. The biggest problem I recall with the LS-120 was the head calibration could vary from drive to drive. So sometimes a disk written on one drive could not be read on a second, but the second drive could write a disk that read fine on the first.
We used LS120s at our list processing company for many years. Before that, we used archaic tapes for data. It was only recently that we switched from the LS120s to online data transfer, and rarely CDs for those that would prefer alternate methods.
I had an internal Superdisk drive, 50 pin SCSI interface, discs made by Verbatim, drive was Matsushita, think i still have it in loft, state of the ark!
state of the ark. Never heard that before, that's kinda clever.
I remember the LS-120 stuff. They were a bit late to the party because by then, Zip disks were everywhere, but I wanted an LS120 sooo bad, not only because it held a whopping 20 more MB than a Zip (hey, that's an additional 20% capacity, not too shabby!) but because it was compatible with regular floppy disks as well. I could just replace my existing floppy with that sweet LS-120 drive.
By the time I was able to afford one, I bought a 2x CD-R drive instead for $200. This was back in 1997. I always lamented missing out on the LS-120, on paper it was superior to the competition in nearly every way, but in hindsight, a Zip drive probably would have been a much better purchase, as they were far more common. Even to this day I get people every so often with old Zip disks that got rid of their drives long ago that need me to get their old data off. And while the disks were physically larger, they seem a lot sturdier than the LS-120 disks.
I think I may still have one of these in the garage. (Er, somewhere.) Had it connected to a Commodore Amiga 3000 back in the days before the chickenlips company folded. It was installed in an external tower-ish case, connected via SCSI, which also had a 60 mega-with-an-m byte hard drive, a CDROM drive, and one of those pre-DVD phase-change drives.
The good ole days of Floppys. Would have loved this for my A1200.
The Super Disk, the best way exchange data with.....nobody since you were the only one to have one back in the days :D
that label application at the end was surprisingly satisfying. thanks for that =)
My dad had an internal IDE LS-120 when I was a kid. I always wanted one. I was always blown away that it was an IDE connector rather than a floppy connector.
I might still have it somewhere in my parts bins.
I did Compaq desktop support in 1995. That Presario really brings back memories.
I remember when my legally blind coworker was given a 20” CRT, that was such a spectacle (pun intended)
I had a work PC with one of these drives built in. What I remember was the ad with the tired looking but still smiling regular floppy standing side by side with the fresh modern looking SuperDisk, emphasizing the backward compatibility SuperDisk had and Zip didn't.
Here's that picture: pbs.twimg.com/media/DVPVRPEUMAAH4F3.jpg
I wanted one of these as a kid because that extra 20mb felt like so much extra space back then
I used LS-120 drives for years in Windows and DOS without any drivers - just connect the drive to IDE. It's mounted as A: or B:, depending on the BIOS settings. It also works on the Amiga, with every available file system. My Elbox FastATA is mounting it on secondary slave as DF7:. It also can read and write 1.44M PC disks with full speed. This was a nice file transfer method between PC and Amiga before compactflash.device.
I loved my internal superdisk drive. I was happy it took the spot of the floppy drive so I didn't need to have a special case or external drive.