When the microcomputer era began in earnest, the floppy disk quickly replaced tape as the portable storage method of choice. They weren’t too big, but they were fine for the average user to get through.
At the same time, it wasn’t long before heavy-duty removable storage solutions hit the market for power users who needed to move many megabytes at a time. In the 1980s, this was primarily the preserve of large print shops, corporate users, and governments. By the 1990s, even the least experienced computer technician was starting to chafe against the brutal 1.44 MB limit of the standard 3.5″ disk. Against this backdrop was introduced the SuperDisk—a product that hoped to take the floppy format to the next level, yet it faltered just as well.
More is Better
SuperDisk was another innovation created by 3M, or more specifically, the company’s end group, Imation. Coming to the market in 1996, it was intended to be the successor to the standard floppy disk. In this era, the default removable storage was a 3.5″ floppy, capable of storing 1.44 MB on a double-sided thick disk in IBM’s dominant format. The SuperDisk can easily cover that with its 120 MB capacity, about ten times what users were used to getting on a compact floppy disk. Back in the mid-1990s, when hard drives were just beginning to flirt with single-digit gigabytes, this was a lot of storage to fit in your pocket.
The format relies on the so-called “floptical” technology. The idea was to use optical guidance to precisely position the magnetic heads that read and write the floppy magnetic platter. This will allow the disk to pack more tracks into each disk space, greatly increasing the storage density. Where a standard 3.5″ floppy disk has 135 tracks per inch, the LS-120 disk will increase that to 2,490 tracks per inch. The LS-120 discs were physically different, due to the need to have visible alignment tracks in the magnetic field that could be read using a laser and sensor. Hence the name LS, which means “laser servo.”
A variety of drives have been made available in the marketplace, both in interior and exterior versions. The latter often used parallel, USB, or SCSI interfaces, while internal drives were accessed via SCSI or ATAPI. Despite the special technology inside SuperDisks, they were very close in size to regular floppies, albeit with a different shutter design. This allowed the SuperDisk drive to read even standard 1.44 MB and 720 KB disks. Notably, however, this was only the case in the PC world—the drives could not read 800 KB or 400 KB Macintosh format discs.
Unfortunately for Imation, SuperDisk had a major problem to overcome from the start. Iomega had already introduced the Zip drive in 1995 to great acclaim, garnering huge orders from the win. The drives were not compatible with conventional floppies in any way, and the first versions only stored 100 MB per disk. However, the early profits of the move launched Iomega’s market share and stock into the stratosphere. There has been little market interest in a budding competitor while purple drives are already sitting on desks in businesses and universities around the world. Even so, the SuperDisk drive still gained traction with major OEMs, appearing as an option on Dell, Compaq, and Gateway computers back then. Panasonic even introduced a line of digital cameras that used larger disks, not unlike Sony’s floppy disk cameras but with more storage that made them more efficient. However, sadly, the uptake has never been high enough to make SuperDisk a mainstream floppy drive replacement, or even a viable or recognized competitor to the all-conquering Zip.
Nevertheless, Matsushita persisted with the SuperDisk concept for some time. In 2001, the company introduced the LS-240 drives, which doubled the capacity to 240 MB per disk. They also came up with a fun party trick that allowed standard 3.5″ floppies to be formatted to hold 32MB. This breakthrough was achieved in part due to the use of magnetic recording (SMR), a technique in which magnetic tracks on a disc are allowed to overlap to increase storage density. Discs with the “FD32MB” format can only be read by LS-240 drives.
By this time, however, the CD burner had taken over the world. With a CD-R or CD-RW selling for less than a dollar apiece, and capable of storing 700MB-plus, SuperDisk’s value proposition faltered, along with many other magnetic storage solutions of the time. The drives would eventually go out of production in 2003, at which time the venerable USB drive was rising to prominence as the go-to form of removable media.
Despite being a little late to the market, there isn’t much wrong with SuperDisk. No major scandals with the reliability of the drives or media, and they had the nice feature of being backwards compatible with existing floppy disks to boot. Sometimes, though, it’s impossible to beat showing up late to the party. Between Iomega’s dominance in the 90s, and the widespread abandonment of magnetic removable media in the early 2000s, we never really had a good time for the SuperDisk to shine. Like many other technologies out there, it was perfectly good at what it was supposed to do, it just didn’t find the right audience. A problem-free solution, perhaps, because others had already solved the problem before SuperDisk saw the light of day.
Featured image: “SuperDisk” by [Miguel Durán]
