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LS-120 Normal Disks

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Raven

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I was under the impression that an LS-120 or LS-240 drive could format an ordinary 1.44MB disk at 10MB or some such thing. I got an LS-120 drive finally, and while I'm still quite happy to have one without this feature, it was disappointing when I right click->format on it and found absolutely nothing new.

Any idea where I got that idea? Is it true? If so, do I need some special tool or format parameters?

Edit: Re-reading around the net I find that LS-240 drives can do this at 32MB. Was I just confusing my information?
 
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The LS-240 could format a typical 3.5" HD floppy to store 32MB with a specialized program. The resultant disk could only be read by LS-240 and could not be altered without reformatting. I think that some of the earliest production LS-240 and all LS-120 models could not read the 32MB format. I only encountered one LS-240 so I have no idea if the disk could be exchanged between drives. See http://www.itreviews.co.uk/hardware/h309.htm for some form of confirmation.

If you are old enough, you might have conflated the LS-240 with certain other large capacity floppy proposals like the 6MB (Kodak?), 10MB (Jasmine), 21MB (Insite), or the improvements to the 2.88MB floppy that Toshiba used to talk up.
 
I definitely had been confusing the numbers of 10MB and 21MB floating about my head, but I'm 20, so it's likely from research and not from familiarity. I happen to be a big fan of floppy disks, so I've read extensively about them in the past (including their various cousins).
 
krebizfan said:
If you are old enough, you might have conflated the LS-240 with certain other large capacity floppy proposals like the 6MB (Kodak?), 10MB (Jasmine), 21MB (Insite), or the improvements to the 2.88MB floppy that Toshiba used to talk up.
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The 6 (and 3MB) were 5.25' and used factory-preformatted disks. The original company was Drivetec and Kodak picked them up for a song when they were in bankruptcy. I have both drives; one branded Drivetec and the other, Kodak as well as a couple of preformatted floppies (which contain an embedded servo).

I have the Insite 3.5" drive (in SCSI, yet!) and it again requires a special floppy with an optical overlay to get to the 20MB mark.

Both types of drives could read and write "normal" density floppies.
 
The Insite drive was 21MB and known as the Floptical. I have an Iomega SCSI branded drive sitting in a box that I picked up at a show for like $2. The Apple II people like them because it provided an easier way to read MFM 720k/1.4MB floppies.
 
Chuck(G) said:
I have the Insite 3.5" drive (in SCSI, yet!) and it again requires a special floppy with an optical overlay to get to the 20MB mark.
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Wow, finally another one who has one! I never got a hold on the media though, nor have I ever tested the drive I got. But it's SCSI alright.
 
njroadfan said:
Don't forget Sony's non-start 150MB HiFD format too.
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I've been looking for one of those for a long time, but I now wonder if any ever made it to the street. My Insite is in a Tulin-branded box. (Anyone remember Tulin?)

There were two competing standards for the "A: drive" replacement--the Brier Technology, which was licensed by 3M for the LS-120 and the Inside 20MB unit. In high-capacity mode, both are mutually incompatible.
 
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Hi-FD did make it to the street, but its extremely rare. Floptical really only gained ground in SGI indigo workstations. The drives were expensive and SCSI only (which was expensive on its own). The Syquest 44/88MB drives controlled the SCSI removable disk drive market in the early 90s (real popular with Mac folks and publishing houses) and Insite/Iomega (the latter also trying with their Bernulli Box) was never able to break into that market at the time. Iomega finally trumped Syquest with the Zip and Jaz drives (until they proved unreliable). Syquest was done in by their flaky Sparq drives, the EZ-Flyer never.... well... flyed. Imation made an honest effort with the LS-120 drives locking in OEM deals (Compaq comes to mind here), but stiff competition from Iomega Zip and dropping CD-R/RW drive costs killed it off. The Castlewood Orb isn't worth mentioning, they sold very few.

Oh, and all the Apple II people bought the Tulin branded Floptical drives.
 
I've still got a (working) Sparq drive, so it was pretty much hit-or-miss. Iomega's competition answer was the Jaz, which when it worked, was okay, but a disk or drive failure could propagate through every disk you tried in the drive.

And then there was MO, which was a completely different matter and came to an unreliable end. I went through several PMS Apex (4.3GB) drives in about three months; PMS just couldn't keep up with the failures still in warranty and eventually declared bankruptcy.

The biggest problem with the LS-120 disks was the cost--about $15 each, which was too high per megabyte, particularly when networking was becoming more common (and cheaper) and at some point, it became simpler to interchange whole 3.5" hard drives instead of cartridges.

One thing I recall about Iomega was that it was one of the first internet the "pump and dump" stocks in the 90's. I remember looking at the stock price and the revenue and P&L and couldn't figure it. People lost a bunch of money on that one.
 
Don't forget the Caleb "it" 144 MB floppy -- which I only remember because I saw it very briefly featured in the Global catalog. And if this company's web site is to be believed, you can buy an "it" drive with two free disks for $1.99:

http://www.surpluscomputers.com/347711/house-brand-caleb-it-144mb.html

Want to replace that creaky 1.44MB floppy drive with something that offers better performance and more capacity? Why not get a Caleb IT drive! This EIDE floppy drive stores 144MB per disk compared to 1.44MB from a standard floppy disk. In fact, you get two 144MB cartridges included with the purchase of the drive! It also reads and writes all standard floppy disks including 1.44MB and 720K.
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The drive I really want to find is an example of the DMA drive that lost out in early contracts to Syquest's earliest drives. I have bid several times on the Avatar Shark which amuses me with its oddball PS/2 port power cable.

I wish I had paid more attention to some of the user group presentations and magazine articles on how to alter controllers and drives to store lots of data on inexpensive media. Reading and sharing were not topics dealt with in depth though some of the units were probably the only prototypes that had not been destroyed which makes sharing a disk unlikely. Now, I almost have enough knowledge to determine why these schemes were doomed to fail.

What I remember of drives designed to read both regular floppies and their own improved storage media was that many regular floppies could not be read in the drive so it was necessary to keep a regular floppy drive around. Something like 10% of 1.44MB and 50% of 720kB floppies would not read in the floptical drives I had access to. Edit: Those Caleb drives felt flimsy; I can't imagine them lasting long if heavily used.

I miss the sense of experimentation that went with all the removable drives even if many didn't work or stopped being made before users could actually use them.
 
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I beg to differ about ZIP being unreliable. I've no say about Jaz drives as I've never used one, but I've never had a ZIP disk fail on me yet and I've been using them for 12 years or so now - same disks. The drives can fail (this has happened to me once if you don't count drives I received pre-failed), but it's not very common.

I'm a huge fan of ZIP technology and am sad that it didn't take the place of modern optical media. It would have been nice to have floppy-style cartridges with unexposed media, faster speeds, etc.. By now we'd have 60GB ZIP disks (Bluray equivalent) and nobody would know the pain of a scratched CD. *sigh*

Anyway at this point in time I just hope flash media takes over optical, because at this point they're nearing the same production point that allowed CDs to become so cheap. It'd be nice to buy a game and find a read-only flash drive or SD card (read-only "flashed" chips to save cost) instead of a disk. Sure the disk can last 500 years, but nobody can store them in ideal conditions, lol.

Anywho I'm getting off topic now, so I'll leave it at that.

Edit: This is where I get my information on old formats, at least aside from general research on a specific one..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#Disk_formats

I think that, like in many other areas, the floppy disk technologies were stifled in some manner of conspiracy to popularize other technologies like optical. I think optical was a brilliant breakthrough that allowed huge storage ahead of it's time (late 80s early 90s), but once other technologies caught up (or nearly caught up) we should have dropped the CD or relegated it to music and retail software.. Companies probably realized it was far cheaper to produce media that didn't require a solid casing, and so shunned the caddy system and newer floppy/floptical technologies that required additional material to produce. Thus the floppy was relegated to a legacy status and caddy technology has been largely forgotten (I wish I could get my hands on a DVD caddy drive - could still use old caddies for it..). Of course, if every disk came in one of those "caddies" (but sealed) and everybody had a caddy drive, I'd likely have my mouth shut with content right now.

I've bought brand new retail games on DVD and not a month later find that the data is corrupted, the game may install properly and then the patch doesn't detect the proper game files to patch due to said corruption, etc. (with no damage to the disk, and proper storage, mind you). A small scratch on the top or bottom of a disk (and the bottom is just plastic, damnit) can cause huge unreadable areas... it's such a frail trechnology. The hard plastic shell of a floppy, and it's metal sheath, have been replaced by a thin piece of plastic on ONE side of the media sheet. That's cheap and pathetic, in my book. I call for a return to days past - take a mini DVD (thin out the plastic on the lower side - just enough to keep it stable) and stick it in a 3.5" floppy casing, make a drive that takes those.

Edit 2: Do you think a DVD-RAM caddy drive can read an ordinary DVD or CD placed into one of it's (or perhaps an old style, they appear to be very similar) caddies?

Edit 3: Couldn't take old-style caddies, according to other people's comparisons. Some DVD-RAM drives can read the normal disks just fine, but aren't caddy style. I haven't seen one that IS caddy style yet available via my eBay search.. At this point perhaps I should move this to a new thread.

Edit 4: Moved the ranting and thinking and research about DVD-RAM and DVDs with Caddies to a new thread in off-topic (http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcf...3918-DVD-RAM-Caddy-Drives&p=167694#post167694) so feel free to ignore that section of my ranting here. :p
 
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Raven said:
I beg to differ about ZIP being unreliable. I've no say about Jaz drives as I've never used one, but I've never had a ZIP disk fail on me yet and I've been using them for 12 years or so now - same disks. The drives can fail (this has happened to me once if you don't count drives I received pre-failed), but it's not very common.

I'm a huge fan of ZIP technology and am sad that it didn't take the place of modern optical media. It would have been nice to have floppy-style cartridges with unexposed media, faster speeds, etc.. By now we'd have 60GB ZIP disks (Bluray equivalent) and nobody would know the pain of a scratched CD. *sigh*

Anyway at this point in time I just hope flash media takes over optical, because at this point they're nearing the same production point that allowed CDs to become so cheap. It'd be nice to buy a game and find a read-only flash drive or SD card (read-only "flashed" chips to save cost) instead of a disk. Sure the disk can last 500 years, but nobody can store them in ideal conditions, lol.

Anywho I'm getting off topic now, so I'll leave it at that.

Edit: This is where I get my information on old formats, at least aside from general research on a specific one..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk#Disk_formats

I think that, like in many other areas, the floppy disk technologies were stifled in some manner of conspiracy to popularize other technologies like optical. I think optical was a brilliant breakthrough that allowed huge storage ahead of it's time (late 80s early 90s), but once other technologies caught up (or nearly caught up) we should have dropped the CD or relegated it to music and retail software.. Companies probably realized it was far cheaper to produce media that didn't require a solid casing, and so shunned the caddy system and newer floppy/floptical technologies that required additional material to produce. Thus the floppy was relegated to a legacy status and caddy technology has been largely forgotten (I wish I could get my hands on a DVD caddy drive - could still use old caddies for it..). Of course, if every disk came in one of those "caddies" (but sealed) and everybody had a caddy drive, I'd likely have my mouth shut with content right now.

I've bought brand new retail games on DVD and not a month later find that the data is corrupted, the game may install properly and then the patch doesn't detect the proper game files to patch due to said corruption, etc. (with no damage to the disk, and proper storage, mind you). A small scratch on the top or bottom of a disk (and the bottom is just plastic, damnit) can cause huge unreadable areas... it's such a frail trechnology. The hard plastic shell of a floppy, and it's metal sheath, have been replaced by a thin piece of plastic on ONE side of the media sheet. That's cheap and pathetic, in my book. I call for a return to days past - take a mini DVD (thin out the plastic on the lower side - just enough to keep it stable) and stick it in a 3.5" floppy casing, make a drive that takes those.

Edit 2: Do you think a DVD-RAM caddy drive can read an ordinary DVD or CD placed into one of it's (or perhaps an old style, they appear to be very similar) caddies?

Edit 3: Couldn't take old-style caddies, according to other people's comparisons. Some DVD-RAM drives can read the normal disks just fine, but aren't caddy style. I haven't seen one that IS caddy style yet available via my eBay search.. At this point perhaps I should move this to a new thread.

Edit 4: Moved the ranting and thinking and research about DVD-RAM and DVDs with Caddies to a new thread in off-topic (http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcf...3918-DVD-RAM-Caddy-Drives&p=167694#post167694) so feel free to ignore that section of my ranting here. :p
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ZIP drives were great in there day and highly reliable. I believe that a major reason that ZIP drives more or less fell by the wayside was pricing. As HD's became more and more affordable, ZIP's still demanded about $10 per cartridge and then there was the issue of 250 MB version not being compatible with the 100 MB version (or vice-versa). In the real world work-place enviroment, you had to make sure you had your install disks, cables, and drive components if you were traveling and knew you were going to visit someone elses's computer. I still have mine and drag it out every once in a while. As for the JAZ drive, myself and one co-worker were the only one's in the department to have them, 10 MB and all. I still have the SCSI PCMCIA card and cable but the JAZ itself bit the dust years ago.
 
Raven said:
I beg to differ about ZIP being unreliable. I've no say about Jaz drives as I've never used one, but I've never had a ZIP disk fail on me yet and I've been using them for 12 years or so now - same disks. The drives can fail (this has happened to me once if you don't count drives I received pre-failed), but it's not very common.
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On the contrary, it's quite common. It even got a nickname. There was a class-action lawsuit against Iomega.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death

A classified system that I worked on in the late 90's used Zip 100's. We were receiving drives from the manufacturer that were already malfunctioning. The drives would damage the disk, then when you tried to read the disk in anothe functioning system, it would damage the heads on it too. We started calling it "the disk clap", because it propagated in the same way as VD.

Saying Zip is reliable, unless the drives are damaged is kind of like saying someone is a little bit pregnant.
 
OTOH, the Bernoulli drives were extremely reliable, but the drives and media were expensive. I believe that all models were also limited to SCSI--at least I've never seen an IDE Bernoulli.

It's funny in a way--most of what's been discussed were promoted as candidates replacing the floppy as the "A:" drive and all failed miserably. In fact, the floppy outlived most of them.

Floppy media has the drawback of limited capacity, but has the advantage of being extremely economical, usable as a distribution medium (how many products are/were distributed on USB pen drives?), and, at least in the less-dense formats, quite reliable. It's a read-write medium where the write speed is the same as the read speed (unlike CD or DVD) and can be stamped out literally in cookie-cutter fashion. It was a combination of several factors that rendered it obsolete:
(1) Growing size (some say "bloat") of software, making installation from floppy impractical and storage of user data problematical. (2) Proliferation of networking and, in particular, the Internet which provided an alternate distribution channel for products. (3) Decline in use of magnetic media in related applications, in particular, VHS and audio tapes. 4. When compared with hard drives, the terrible "byte per buck" ratio. Originally, the cheapest way to store information, it became the most expensive.

If someone came out with a "revised" floppy drive that cost less than $50 with media that cost less than $1 per unit and held, say, 2GB, I think it might stand a chance at a comeback. But I don't see anything on the horizon.
 
dpatten said:
On the contrary, it's quite common. It even got a nickname. There was a class-action lawsuit against Iomega.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death

A classified system that I worked on in the late 90's used Zip 100's. We were receiving drives from the manufacturer that were already malfunctioning. The drives would damage the disk, then when you tried to read the disk in anothe functioning system, it would damage the heads on it too. We started calling it "the disk clap", because it propagated in the same way as VD.

Saying Zip is reliable, unless the drives are damaged is kind of like saying someone is a little bit pregnant.
Click to expand...

Agreed. The "click of death" was infamous for many years. It is a well known design flaw.

I like Zip drives. But when I test one I use a known good disk, and if it clicks, both the drive and the disk go out the door. They were not built to be robust - you can't hit that price point and be well built. I think that most floppy drives have better build quality, and one advantage a floppy drive has is that you can format the media - Zip disks need to be factory formatted.

Now, the Bernoulli Box - those are beautiful, and built well. But that was before Iomega went mass market with the Zip.
 
dpatten said:
On the contrary, it's quite common. It even got a nickname. There was a class-action lawsuit against Iomega.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Click_of_death

A classified system that I worked on in the late 90's used Zip 100's. We were receiving drives from the manufacturer that were already malfunctioning. The drives would damage the disk, then when you tried to read the disk in anothe functioning system, it would damage the heads on it too. We started calling it "the disk clap", because it propagated in the same way as VD.

Saying Zip is reliable, unless the drives are damaged is kind of like saying someone is a little bit pregnant.
Click to expand...

That depends on what one compares it with. Zip Drives were more reliable than many MFM or early IDE hard drives or some competing removable disk systems which was impressive considering the price. The click of death article point to how a mistaken attempt at cost reduction backfired for the Zip drive. Another redesign occurred around the time of the Zip-250 which improved matters. Basically, 1994-1996 drives and drives made in 1999 and later all worked fairly well; in between, well, not a good time to buy Zip.
 
And yet, it's the Zip 100 that went into the Mac G3 boxes by default, wasn't it? That was also the time when Iomega stock was more than 80 bucks a share, based on pure speculation.
 
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