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LS-120 drives as floppy replacements

glitch

glitch

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I recently found an IDE LS-120 drive with several disks on CraigsList for $10 and decided I'd give it a try as a replacement for a real floppy, or my current USB solution. It seems to read 1.44 MB disks just fine under Linux, and even though it shows up as a SCSI drive, I can dd floppy images to it just fine.

Has anyone had experience in using these as floppy replacements? I'd been using a USB drive in this particular machine, as the motherboard doesn't have a floppy controller. Are they as reliable as regular 1.44 MB drives, and do they have better or worse luck reading from media in not-so-great condition? I still use floppies quite a bit, especially in moving data between early Macs and my main desktop (Linux reads 1.4 MB Mac floppies just fine), so having an internal solution would be nice.
 
The LS120 drives are nice because they spin the media faster, so things happen quickly. However, their error recovery isn't so great and you don't often get the "retry, ignore, abort" error choices--things just abort by default.

I use an LS120 to handle diskettes pretty much known to be good that don't have any weird formatting issues and it works just fine. But I also have a legacy 1.44M drive in the same system.
 
My only issue with them was that few motherboards supported it as a replacement for a real floppy drive under the BIOS so if you didn't have support, you could not floppy boot.
 
I experienced reliability issues back when I got one of these, they were relatively new at the time and seemed like a cheap way to move and store a lot more than a regular floppy. I'd write a bunch of data onto one, and check it to be fine afterwards, but after a couple of days the disks would be virtually unreadable. it seemed to be picky about regular media as well, but if a disk worked it would work just fine.

That's just my personal experience with one drive and one package of media though, I've heard good reviews from others on many occasions. Maybe I just had a faulty drive, but I was never too inclined to run out and buy another...
 
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Only thing I ever did was format a 120meg disk. Took pretty looooong lol!

Anyone happen to know if theres any LS-120 drives out there that also work with the 2.88 ED disks? I only found some scetchy references on forums and such, not really reliable
 
AFAIK, 2.88MB DSED was never supported in LS120 drives. There is also an LS240 drive, but they're pretty thin on the ground.

I've never used my LS120 for anything but 1.44MB, 1.23MB and 720KB 3.5" floppies. There are some configurations where XP will hang during boot if an LS120 drive is introduced into the configuration.
 
Chuck(G) said:
AFAIK, 2.88MB DSED was never supported in LS120 drives. There is also an LS240 drive, but they're pretty thin on the ground.

I've never used my LS120 for anything but 1.44MB, 1.23MB and 720KB 3.5" floppies. There are some configurations where XP will hang during boot if an LS120 drive is introduced into the configuration.
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From Xp onward, many of the older LS-120 drives were no longer supported. Atleast their 120MB disks, they should still be able to work with the normal floppies.

Btw, there should also be some LS-120 2x speed drives floating around, alas all mines are the old 1st generation internal ones.
 
Tetrium said:
From Xp onward, many of the older LS-120 drives were no longer supported. Atleast their 120MB disks, they should still be able to work with the normal floppies.
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Never could get XP to boot with an LS120 on an NForce Athlon system. Tried every combination of cabling that I could. Hang city.

On the other hand, it works fine with other motherboards.

Anyone have a Sony HFD drive?
 
I have a nice Intel Server Board that supports two floppy-port floppy drives, plus an LS-120-as-floppy. So I have an LS-120, plus one of the Teac dual-drives. And just for good measure, there's also an ATAPI ZIP drive in the puppy. :-D

I also have a USB LS-120 drive as my primary OS X floppy drive. Works just fine with both conventional floppies and LS-120 disks in OS X Snow Leopard.

None of them can read 2.88 MB floppies. 2.88 MB floppies are an oddball. The only major computers to have used them were IBM's PS/2s, and the post-floptical NeXT systems - which use the same physical 2.88 MB "ED" floppies, but in a completely incompatible format. My NeXT can read and write 1.44 MB DOS-formatted floppies just fine, but not 2.88 MB DOS-formatted. I have to reformat in NeXTstep to get my 2.88 MB disk working. (I have exactly one 2.88 MB disk.)

The LS-240 has an interesting trick up its sleeve, though. It can "burn" 32 MB onto a bog-standard 1.44 MB HD disk. I phrase it that way because it's a WORM-type operation. You write your data to the disk much like burning an old CD-R, as an all-at-once affair. You can then erase the disk and start over; but it is no longer random-write in 32 MB mode. And, obviously, only another LS-240 drive can read it. I have never seen an actual 240 MB disk, but I've used 1.44 MB disks as a 32 MB floppy before on an LS-240 drive.
 
Chuck(G) said:
.....
Anyone have a Sony HFD drive?
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Nope, and I can't remember ever having found one in the wild. Or I just missed them completely because I didn't recognize it correctly. I think I seen a couple for sale at PC Dumpdag (±computer fleamarket, RIP) but they were WAY too expensive for me.

I do have a single floptical drive made by Insite though. Never tried it out and I don't have any of the 21MB floptical media anyway.

I'm basically using 2.88MB, LS-120 and ZIP disk/drives but only using the ZIP and 2.88M disks from time to time in any practical way (got a couple very nice-looking ZIP 250 USB drives). Got a homemade external 2.88M drive though, should prove usefull as I don't have any floppy controllers capable of supporting 2.88M drives.
 
Tetrium said:
I do have a single floptical drive made by Insite though. Never tried it out and I don't have any of the 21MB floptical media anyway.

I'm basically using 2.88MB, LS-120 and ZIP disk/drives but only using the ZIP and 2.88M disks from time to time in any practical way (got a couple very nice-looking ZIP 250 USB drives). Got a homemade external 2.88M drive though, should prove usefull as I don't have any floppy controllers capable of supporting 2.88M drives.
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I've got one of the Insites too, SCSI unit in a box marketed by Tulin. But I've never seen a HFD in the flesh and haven't seen media offered either.

Almost all PCs with floppy support made within the last 15 years has 2.88M support, even if the BIOS setup never claims it. 1Mbps support pretty much comes free with any relatively recent (post 1990) floppy controller chip.
 
There was also Sony HiFD (150 and 200 MB) and Caleb "it" UHD144 (144 MB). Both offered backwards compatibility with 1.44 MB floppy disks, but neither format caught on; in fact, the HiFD 150 MB drives suffered from serious reliability problems, and were quickly pulled from the market.

Another flop was the 750 MB Iomega Zip drive. It arrived so late to the market that CD-RWs had already caught on and rendered it obsolete. Iomega crippled backwards compatibility, too, by making the 250 MB drives work very slowly when using 100 MB disks, and the 750 MB Zip drives can only read 100 MB disks, not write to them.
 
One issue with the LS120 drives (and with any IDE, SCSI, or USB floppy drive is that the supported floppy formats are, for all intents and purposes, pre-defined and addressed, not by cylinder head and sector, but by relative sector address (0 = first sector, 320 = 320th sector, etc.). All basically use the SCSI command set.

So that means if you have, say, an IBM XDF fioppy, the LS120 isn't going to read it or any other sufficiently alien format, such as the disks from a Sony SMC-70. The other implication is that error control or recovery is completely under the control of the drive firmware, so if your disk errors out with an unrecoverable CRC error, for example, you'll get nothing back. A legacy FDC, on the other hand, will still transfer the erroneous data, offering some hope of partial recovery. And, of course, any 3.5" copy-protected floppy will not be usable.

So don't toss that legacy drive, yet.

On the other hand, LS120 and USB drives do automatically recognize DOS-V (PC98) media automatically, which formerly required a 3-mode floppy and the associated drives and controller to work.

My understanding of the reliability issues with the Sony HFD were due to the heads being non-contact, which means that tracking a flexible substrate and dealing with lowered SNR and resolution come back to bite you. I'd still like to have one to add to my collection, however.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I've got one of the Insites too, SCSI unit in a box marketed by Tulin. But I've never seen a HFD in the flesh and haven't seen media offered either.

Almost all PCs with floppy support made within the last 15 years has 2.88M support, even if the BIOS setup never claims it. 1Mbps support pretty much comes free with any relatively recent (post 1990) floppy controller chip.
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I've never tried a 2.88 drive with any of my ISA floppy controllers but I did google all of them for any documentation. Those docs tell me my controllers won't work with 2.88 drives. Only with 1.44 ones. Like I mentioned, never actually tried any of them, atleast not with a 2.88 drive.

I bought my Insite drive at a 2nd hand store. I saw it lying there for just a couple euro's, couldn't let this one slip by me :D

750MB ZIP drives seem also a LOT more infrequent, so far I've only found one but atleast it came with a whole bunch of 750MB ZIP disks :)
Btw, I thought the 750MB ZIP drives would work only with 250MB disks but not with 100MB disks.

I'd like to have one or a couple of those very exotic floppydrives as well btw, will be very hard to find any of the media though.
It was hard enough to find the 2.88 disks, the drives were a LITTLE easier to find. Found 2 in the wild and the rest I bought cheaply at computer fleamarkets :)

I even have a 2.88 drive in my Athlon 64, it'll work with Winimage just fine. It's a shame Virtual PC doesn't support those drives anymore. Perhaps some (very) old VPC version does but haven't been able to track that one down yet. Perhaps I just never searched hard enough.
 
Look at the datasheet for the FDC chip. If it's an Intel 82077AA-1 or later, or a National NS8477, you've got 2.88 capability, even if the BIOS doesn't have support for it. All of my P2 and P3 systems have 2.88 support and there were numerous add-in cards (e.g. Compaticard IV and many others) that have BIOS support.

Many vendors didn't bother with 2.88 BIOS support, as it pretty much died as a viable format with the PS/2 line.
 
I just have the old fashioned ISA floppy multi-controllers. I never encountered any motherboard with onboard floppy controller that didn't support 2.88 drives. Even my new quadcore has support for it in it's BIOS (I purposefully got a motherboard with the now increasingly rare onboard floppy controller :) )
 
LS-120s? Loved them My only gripe is that i can't find more disks for it. and they, in my experience, can read DMF and XDF formats, but has to be done from dos, they make great substitutes if you have the support for them
 
k2x4b524[ said:
LS-120s? Loved them My only gripe is that i can't find more disks for it. and they, in my experience, can read DMF and XDF formats, but has to be done from dos, they make great substitutes if you have the support for them
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Just tried an XDF floppy in my LS120 from DOS. No soap. Do you have a different firmware rev?
 
Need to copy data from LS120

Need to copy data from LS120

Hallo everybody,

I used to have a LS120 years ago. Always thought it to be great for backups. Until my drive broke down. :(
Would any of you be willing to let me copy my data (if still readable after 10? years) to a USB-stick? You can have the disks afterwards. Preferably someone living near Ghent, Belgium.

Thanks in advance
 
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