The humble floppy disk in its various incarnations ruled the computer world for a long time. Too long, as it turns out. Eventually, the tiny capacity of floppy disks was a mismatch for growing hard drives and ballooning file sizes, so something new was needed.
Actually, replacing the floppy was easier said than done. In the end, the true successor to the floppy was the CD and USB thumb drives. It’s quite puzzling on the surface, because on paper Imation’s SuperDisks looked like the perfect floppy successor, despite the stiff competition.
The SuperDisk tried to be the “perfect” floppy upgrade
A drop-in replacement
There were quite a few “floppy killers” that tried to dethrone these ubiquitous plastic disks, but the LS-120 SuperDisk is the one that most closely resembles the thing it was trying to replace. Compare these LS-120 disks with standard 3.5-inch floppies and keep in mind that this is 1.44MB versus a whopping 120MB!
The overall dimensions and shape are similar. The only instant “tell” is the interesting design of the sliding disk protector, with the SuperDisk having a more intricate and futuristic look to it.
Backward compatibility wasn’t enough to change user habits
You could still copy that floppy
SuperDisks didn’t just look like the floppies they were trying to replace. If you swapped out your floppy drive for an LS-120 drive, you could keep using all your floppies. You didn’t need to fit two 3.5-inch drives, which most home PCs cases weren’t set up for anyway back then.
So, again, the SuperDisk was set up for success. There was no downside to switching on a technical level. You could use your own SuperDisks and floppy disks that anyone handed you. However, the LS-120 faced exactly the same chicken-and-egg problem in the face of the floppy’s entrenched position.
In fact, a part of the problem might well have been that, to the average person, SuperDisks didn’t seem all that different to floppies unless you took the time to read up about them.
- Storage Capacity
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6TB
- Brand
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Seagate
The Seagate Expansion 6TB external hard drive is an excellent starting point if you are building a laptop NAS, offering plenty of capacity for backups and media. It is affordable, easy to set up, and fast enough over USB 3.0 for most home server use cases.
CDs didn’t care about compatibility—and that was the point
The future should look like the future
While 120MB is a lot more than 1.44MB, that’s nothing compared to 1.44MB versus 650MB! Before you could write files to a CD using a computer, it quickly became the preferred way to distribute software. Who would want to install Windows from several dozen floppies when you could pop in a single CD?
Maybe if software developers chose LS-120 as a way to distribute software, things could have been different. But, the disks were far more expensive than a CD, which cost mere cents per disc. Here we have the old chicken-and-egg situation again, but it favored CDs because you had a good reason to buy a CD-ROM drive. That’s where all the content was going.
In the meantime, regular floppies were still OK for small files, and the minute CD-R technology became affordable it was all over for floppies too.
Cost, speed, and reliability killed the SuperDisk
There’s a theme with these floppy killers
Just like the Zip, Jaz, and Click drives, the SuperDisk had technical issues. Relatively unreliable disks and drives, at least early on, didn’t give people confidence versus the mature floppy and later certainly not against mechanically simple and robust CDs.
Access times were a point of contention, since Imation’s “floptical” technology that used lasers to help with magnetic tracking was sluggish. Transfer speeds weren’t bad. Although the theoretical max speed was 1.2MB/s, in the real world it was closer to the speed of a 2x CD-ROM. So you can imagine how quickly CD-ROM drives blasted past that limit with 4x, 8x, 12x speed drives coming quickly.
A shifting idea of what “storage” even meant
CDs normalized cheap, disposable, distribution-focused media. Instead of reusing a handful of disks forever, people started burning archives, music collections, and software installers onto piles of inexpensive optical discs.
Soon after that, USB flash drives arrived and rendered both technologies obsolete for small personal removable storage by combining portability, rewritability, speed, and huge capacity in a tiny solid-state device.
The LS-120 is a great example of the “build a better mousetrap” problem. The idea was to make a floppy, but better. The thing is, the world didn’t need a better floppy. It needed fundamentally different solutions. If the LS-120 had arrived 10 years earlier, it could have been huge, but timing was not on its side.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
