Imation super disk drive

[Apostrophe]

My dad came back from his office today with a whole bunch of Mac stuff that his office no longer uses. There were a few mice, an OS CD for a Power Macintosh G3, other various utility CDs, various manuals, a RAM stick, tons of floppy disks, brand-new Zip disks, and an Imation super disk drive.

All I want to keep is the Imation super disk drive, the floppy disks, and one of the mice. The rest I'll sell, so if you're interested in anything else mentioned above, just PM me.

But I had a question about the USB Imation super disk drive. I know that I could easily look it up online, but we all know that some things you just can't find out unless you go to a forum like this one.

All I want to know is, will it work with my iMac G3 and if so, can it both read and write floppies, or just read them?

Thanks,

-Apostrophe

 

[Unknown_K]

The imation super disks read and write 1.44MB disks and their 120MB superdisks. Then USB ones have drivers for the Mac. I have a PCMCIA unit that is PC only, plus an internal drive in one of my PCs.

 

[mac2geezer]

I have an Imation USB floppy drive, for 1.44 MB disks, that I used on an iMac G3 with no problems. It will read, write, and format floppies in either Mac or PC 1.44 format and in 720 PC format, but not Mac 400 or 800 disks.

Not sure if this one is a Super drive but probably not, but should be roughly the same capability.

 

[tomlee59]

And if it's one of the late models (LS-240), it has the interesting ability to squeeze 32MB onto an ordinary 1.44MB floppy disk.

 

[LCGuy]

Tom: Really? How does that work? :O And is it reliable? :O

 

[tomlee59]

Pretty amazing achievement, I agree. These drives squeeze many more tracks onto the disk by using narrower heads (much like the ones used in hard drives), and laying down a track by sensing where an adjacent one is, so that it can space the new one accordingly. To make things a bit easier on the engineers, you are forced to write the whole disk at once (no modifying a piece here and there), so it's a lot like writing to a CD in "disk-at-once" mode. For music collections and such, it's not too bad. Plus, it's just miraculous that you can successfully store 25x more data than a floppy was ever intended to hold.

As to reliability, there were certainly many skeptics when the technology debuted. The manufacturers claimed that their extensive use of error correction made these things have "very good" reliability, but these are floppies, after all...Alas, CD burners came down in price right around when this technology was trying to gain traction, so there doesn't seem to be much independent data about reliability. I've never run any life tests (formal or informal), but I wouldn't trust the disks over the long term. I have too many 20-year old ordinary floppies that have developed magnetic Alzheimer's; I shudder to imagine how quickly they would've failed had I attempted to cram 25x the data they were designed for.

Still, a pretty neat trick!

 

[Bunsen]

On the other foot, might they be able to successfully read otherwise departed 1.4MB floppies? What with all their ultra fine headiness.

 

[tomlee59]

Brilliant, Bunsen -- that may very well be true. It is quite possible that these drives would be able to read damaged floppies that are unreadable in ordinary drives. I'll have to keep that in mind, the next time I come across a balky floppy!

 

[Bunsen]

I live to serve

 

[Temetka]

I think you have that backwards, Bunsen.

So 32MB on a floppy huh? Interesting. I have a few LS-120 disks laying around so that wouldn't be an issue.

So how does one go about formatting a 1.44 floppy for 32MB?

On that note I have a box of 10 2.88MB floppies (very rare!), I wonder if they will work in my superdrive and if so if I could format them for 64MB.

 

[tomlee59]

You need an LS-240 drive to enable 32meg magic. The first-generation (LS-120) superdisk drives will not do this. Plus, you'll need the utilities that shipped with the drives to allow this "disk-at-once" mode. I do not know if the Mac versions are available for download (or if they even exist, for that matter).

The magnetic material in 2.88MB floppies is barium ferrite, which has quite different properties (much higher coercivities, for one) from the ferric oxide stuff used in other floppies. I doubt that the LS-240 drives are capable of writing to such media, but I don't know for certain. If you give it a try, report back. I'd love to know the answer.