[Coco] Fw: Help floppy drive

[Joel Ewy]

L. Curtis Boyle wrote:

> On Thu, 12 Apr 2007 16:59:53 -0600, Joel Ewy <jcewy at swbell.net> wrote:

>

>> And don't forget 2.88M.  I sort of understand why those never caught on,

>> but not quite.  I guess it was that they came out at about the same time

>> as CD-ROMs, and while 2.88M floppies halve the number of disks you need

>> to ship, CD-ROM (at the time) reduced it to one.  But still... You often

>> still see support for it in the BIOS.  But you never see the drives or

>> disks.  I've seen the drives in IBM PS/1 and PS/2 systems a few times.

>>

>> And that's not even counting things like those oddball Superdrives that

>> could put something like 32M on an ordinary 1.4M floppy...

>

> Having used several 2.88 MB drives here at work, they were NOT very

> reliable (at least, whatever brand we had wasn't... they tended to

> scramble way more often than 720K or 1.44 MB (3.5" we are talking

> about here).

>

> I actually had a USB "superdrive" (read/wrote 720K, 1.44MB and special

> 20MB floppies) here at work, and it was actually more reliable than

> the 2.88 (probably because of the laser to guide the head). Later, I

> think they got up to 120MB on a floppy, didn't they?

>

Here's a Wikipedia article ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk )
about the LS-120 SuperDisk, which is what I was thinking about.  The
LS-240 variant could apparently put 32M on an ordinary 1.44M disk, but
you had to erase and re-write the entire disk if you changed anything.

JCE

>

> --L. Curtis Boyle

>

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