SuperDisk
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- "LS120" redirects here. For the DEC dot matrix printer, see dot matrix printer#Early dot matrix printers.
Also known as the LS-120 and the later variant LS-240, the SuperDisk was introduced by 3M's storage products group (later known as Imation) circa 1997 as a high-speed, high-capacity alternative to the 90 mm (3.5 in), 1.44 MB floppy disk. SuperDisk's main claim to fame was that in addition to being able to read and write its native 120 MB (later 240 MB) disks, the drives could read and write the 1.44 MB floppy format (MFM) that was still popular at the time. The newer LS-240 drives also have the ability to read and write regular 1.44 MB floppies at much higher densities.
The true capacity of these "120 MB" drives is 120.375 MiB (6848 cylinders × 36 blocks/cylinder × 512 bytes [1]). The "240 MB" drives have a true capacity of 240.75 MiB.
The design of the SuperDisk system came from an early 1990s project at Iomega. It is one of the last examples of Floptical technology, where lasers are used to guide a magnetic head which is much smaller than those used in traditional floppy disk drives. Iomega orphaned the project around the time they decided to release the Zip drive in 1994. The idea eventually ended up at 3M, where the concept was refined and the design was licensed to established floppy drive makers Matsushita (Panasonic) and Mitsubishi. Other companies involved in the development of SuperDisk included Compaq and OR Technology.
3M/Imation mainly sold Matsushita-built drives under the SuperDisk name; other companies tended to use the LS-120 name, and sold the Mitsubishi drives. However, the system was not a huge success. Few OEMs supported it, aside from Compaq. Most SuperDisk drives suffered from slow performance and reliability problems. The biggest hurdle standing in the way of success was that Iomega's Zip drive had been out for 3 years at that point. It had enough popularity to leave the public uninterested in SuperDisk technology despite its superior design and its compatibility with the standard floppy disk.
By 2000, the entire removable-disk category was quickly being obsoleted by the falling prices of CD-R drives, and the SuperDisk was no exception; it has since been quietly discontinued, as were the special disks, which are getting hard to find.
Matsushita continued development of the technology and released the LS-240, which was still fairly available in Asia and Australia until 2003 but is now quite rare. It has double the capacity and the added feature of being able to format regular floppy disks to 32 MB capacity. However, this higher density comes at a price—the entire disk must be rewritten any time a change is made, much like early CD-RW media.
SuperDisk drives have been sold in parallel port, USB, ATAPI and SCSI variants. All drives can read and write 1.44 MB (1440 KiB) and 720 kB (720 KiB) MFM floppies, as used on PCs, Apple Macintoshes produced 1988–1998, and many workstations.
Today, the format faces heavy competition from recordable CDs and DVDs, as well as solid state USB keydrives.
SuperDisk should not be confused with SuperDrive, which is a trademark used by Apple Computer for various disk drive products.
A SuperDisk drive was used in a Panasonic digital camera, the PV-SD4090, which allowed it to use both SuperDisk (LS120) and 3.5" floppy disks as the memory media.
