QPS today introduced the Que! LS-240 SuperDisk external drive, the latest-generation of its removable USB storage solution. The new drive, which supports 240 MB disks and the technology for reformatting 3.5 inch 1.44MB disks to store up to 32 MB, is also backwards compatible with both conventional floppies and LS120MB disks. The Que! LS-240 will begin shipping in May for $179 in the U.S.
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It's actually 240M rather than 120M like the older SuperDisk.
The 32M is using normal 1.44M floppies - it can reformat them for 32M.
Is this the same technology as the now discontinued but once very popular Imation SuperDisk drives?
How in the world? Format a 1.44 MB floppy disk to hold 32 MB?
Huh?
Can someone please elaborate here?
There are some tricks such as making sectors physically smaller (requiring a special read/write head) and by reorgainzing data on the disk.
I guess you could also compress via hardware the data or other info used to *locate* data on a disk.
Most of the old-school limits were based on the hardware not being small enough or precise enough. M.O. disks use an optical tracking mechanism to very precisely follow magneticly stored data tracks and locate data in a very dense format.
Anything is possible if you make it (hardware) small enough and get enough brainpower working on it (software/firmware).
I think this is awesome. Heck, if I still needed floppies or still needed to choose between a zip250 and this, I think I'd choose the superdisk. Geez... I still might decide to get one. And with the size of these disks now, they should consider making firewire versions. I'm impressed. Maybe with some competition, Iomega will start making their zip format more stable and overall, better.
The ZIP 100 (don't know about the 250) is somewhat better than the SuperDisk (SuperDisk only gets floppy speeds, Zip is somewhat better). But I think the time for magnetic media has passed. Why not go with CDs? You can get a burner for far less than $179. And a CD-R is only 15 cents now, or 50 cents for a CD-RW. That gets you 650 MB -- more than a Zip or a SuperDisk. Disc Burner makes the process easy. And you can read the disc in any computer with a CD drive (that is, just about any computer made since around 1995).
For those whose needs aren't met by CD-R/W, an external FireWire hard drive is a good choice, too. But there isn't really any place for magnetic media anymore, IMO.
Though the desktop mountablility and ease of use of SD and Zip are nice, it seems like every time I count on one of those disks for backup, it will become unmountable! I have two ZIP drives and two Imation SD drives and all of them get flakey at one time or another, usually when I need them the most. I'm going with the CD-RW.
Let it go. The floppy war is over, Floppies lost. CD-RW won with Zip coming in close to second. Jaz, Syquest and Floppy need to flop their a$$ on down to the junk yard.
32 Mb bwaahahahahaha I can email 32 MBs to myself faster than it takes to copy that over to a floppy and risk having it burn up on re-entry.
Does anyone still use floppies? Probably hicks still trying to load Dos onto their wintel 2000 machine. "oh look at me maw, I can edit my config.sys.bat to load up Windows 2000 in text mode. Im's a learned real good in that tech college" Obviously I know nothing about wintel or DOS, I moved into the 21st century back in 1984, and into the 22nd in 1998 when Jesus Jobs gave us the iMac.
The CastleWood ORB drive works well.
The floppy is somewhat usefull. Untill we get a widely accepted, CHEAP MEDIA, CHEAP DRIVE, removable storage, the floppy will have its place.
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Whats with the (32MB) ?