I've never run any life tests (formal or informal), but I wouldn't trust the disks over the long term.
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. Plus, it's just miraculous that you can successfully store 25x more data than a floppy was ever intended to hold.Īs to reliability, there were certainly many skeptics when the technology debuted. For music collections and such, it's not too bad. 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.
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.
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Imation also released a SuperDisk version with “Secured Encryption Technology,” which uses Blowfish, a symmetric-key block cipher with a 64-bit key to encrypt the contents.Pretty amazing achievement, I agree. The Imation USB Lock is a USB security software provides data security with password. The SuperDisk drive itself is compatible with 1.44 BM and 720 MB floppy formats. The SuperDisk LS-120 includes 120 MB of disk storage while the LS-240 contains 240 MB of disk storage. However, any time a change is made to the LS-240, the entire disk must be rewritten like early CD-RW media.Ī SuperDisk drive was included in two Panasonic digital cameras, the PV-SD4090 and PV-SD5000, which could use both SuperDisk (LS120) and 3.5-inch floppy disks as the memory media. Imation SuperDisk USB Drive (120 MB) Digital Storage Capacity, 0.12 GB Compatible Devices, Desktop Hard Disk Interface, USB 1.1 Brand, Imation Specific. BYTEEC Smart Drive SATA or IDE to USB 2.0 Hard Drive Drivers. Adaptec 29160 PCI to Ultra160 SCSI Card Driver. Alfa AWUS036NH 802.11n Wireless USB Wi-Fi Adapter Drivers.
The SuperDisk LS-240 has double the capacity of the LS-120 and could also format regular floppy disks up to 32 MB capacity. ATI Desktop/Mobility Radeon HD 4300 Series Drivers. Update your nVidia graphics processing unit to the latest drivers.
The SuperDisk system is one of the last examples of floptical technology where lasers are used to guide a magnetic head that is significantly smaller than the magnetic heads used in traditional floppy disk drives. Imation ceased manufacturing the SuperDisk LS-120 in 2003. The SuperDisk was successful in Asia and Australia but had little success in North America because Compaq, Gateway, and Dell were three of only a handful of original equipment manufacturers. The SuperDisk was manufactured primarily by Matsushita. The SuperDisk hardware was designed by 3M’s storage products group Imation in 1997. Eastman Kodak Co to buy Imation Corps medical imaging business for 520. The SuperDisk LS-120 is a high-speed, high-capacity alternative to the 1.44 MB, 90-mm (3.5-inch) floppy disk. SuperDisk drive from Panasonic and Imation can squeeze 32 megabytes of data.