SuperDisk | Hacker News Reader

SuperDisk

en.wikipedia.org

If you're interested in these types of old technologies, do check out the fantastic youtube channel "Technology Connections".

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy0tKL1T7wFoYcxCe0xjN6Q

I found out about it a few weeks ago and am ridiculously happy I did. It immediately jumped in my top 3 favourite channels. Lots of deep dives into how last-century technologies worked, that neither talk down nor overwhelm. And the guy's really funny as well. Look at his videos and choose one you like, or start with one of his playlists such as the story of Laserdisc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg8tK1LpLS8&list=PLv0jwu7G_D...

Technology Connections is great. I love all those old-tech youtubers like 8-bit Guy, Techmoan, Perifractic and co. It feels like there's been a real explosion in that scene in the last few years.

RetroAhoy is also pretty good - he goes over the technical and business aspects of 80s and 90s gaming, including amiga, wolfenstein, doom, quake, half life, polybius, monkey island, etc. Very entertaining, with lots of detail & backstory. And a cool British accent.

https://www.youtube.com/user/XboxAhoy

Yes! Another of my top channels. His Polybius documentary is top-notch.

Zip disks were much more popular. I worked as a computer hardware technician in an independent computer shop in the late 90s, and while I'd heard of the LS-* drives, Zip drives were the only ones I'd worked with. We had an external one on the work bench.

CD writers were available at the time, but typically you'd use a CD-R not CD-RW owing to expense, and it was something you'd need to do exclusively, as in not use the computer for anything else. If the machine was too busy multitasking, you'd get a buffer underrun, which would turn the CD-R into a coaster. Zip disks and equivalent were more like floppies in this respect.

SuperDisk was my first exposure to the idea that better ideas don't always win out in technology.

To be fair it just came to market too late.

Zip drives where already on the market for a couple of years with similar price and capacity and I remember them to be more popular.

I too used zip disks, they were required for our graphic design work at our college, but the Superdisk always struck me as better because of the backwards compatibility.

Not to mention Zipdisks eventual click of death

I had a Zip at home, we used it to back up our 800mb hard drive! Pretty wild.

A bit like the Sony minidisc? It was poised by Sony's tight claws on it.

pretty much like everything sony develops, remember the sony memory stick anyone?

Love the nestalga. I worked at Iomega from 1990 to 1994 during the Zip Drive boom. The LS-120 was our only real competitor for most of that time.

Super anecdote and not much to do with the article if you'll indulge me. I have a weird fond memory with my dad when I was in middle school in 1998 or so and we went to the computer parts store, as we always did on Sundays, to browse. They had their technology which seemed to be totally revolutionary. I couldn't believe it held so much more than a regular floppy. I learned all about it, and when I was 16 got a part time summer job at a local ISP because of what I learned and the interest I developed. To this day I remain in software!

A true shame that both local ISPs and computer parts stores have mostly vanished

I was always surprised MD-Data never took off. Even with low acceptance as an audio recording media, volumes should have been enough for it to effectively compete with Zip, SyQuest and others.

I had a Sony Minidisc player that could record discs. Every time I used one, I felt like a badass, probably because of this scene in The Matrix: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEP4fXRWImU

My disappointment is that MO died out altogether. Because the discs are in a cartridge, they're mechanically robust, and because they use MO technology for recording, the storage is stable, making them really good for long-term storage.

There's AFAIK still a small but stable user base of larger (5.25" & 3.5") MO drives - usually in specific backup purposes, sometimes in combination or as replacement of WORM drives. Usually for legally mandated copies.

Sony discontinued MO media manufacture in 2015, IIRC. I'm not sure where media would be coming from now.

MD-Data was a flop since it was Sony proprietary, but the more open "MO" Magneto-optical format based on the same technology was very successful in Japan (equivalent to Zip disks in the west). I wonder why it never caught on in the west.

Comparison photo: https://imgur.com/a/gpNk0SV

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive

I still have a box of floppies for my SGI Indy, which are an amusing side-note in all of this storage shenanigans .. and I also maintain a large Zip and Jaz collection, among other things.

These are all safely being retired because of the efficacy of the HxC drive, which is a device that allows you to emulate physical characteristics of legacy media in a way where grumpy old computers reliant on such mechanisms can get over the storage-decay woes and use .. a USB Stick .. to access its library.

As a retro-nerd, with a rather extensive collection of these machines with new school storage solutions, I often am amused at the notion of, for example, a 6502-based machine with 64K of RAM, having an 8-gig storage device attached to it.

Literally every bit of software, ever written for such a machine onboard, plus what seems like absolutely infinite future storage ..

For old machines, where these floppy mechanisms have perished, the HxC drive is a godsend. I still hope to be able to use the Indy's weird floppies a bit more in the future, though, they're a neat oddity ..

Yes, the HxC devices are great - they emulate an actual floppy drive which can talk to a real floppy controller as opposed to many of the other ‘modern storage for retrocomputing’ devices which interface at a higher level.

I’d also add that on the other side, to image all the old floppies I found the Kryoflux a good solution - it allows you to record them at the magnetic flux transition level which helps with copy protection mechanisms and/or slightly corrupt discs.

I remember my syquest 240. That was the greatest thing in the world at the time... it was very nearly as fast as my internal hard drive, and I could expand it in increments I could easily afford.

It is really something how hard I had to think about storage in the early - mid '90s. I'm happy that it requires next-to-no mental energy from me now.

I had a SyQuest EZ135. It was great, big enough at the time to install Windows on so I could basically swap OS's with each disk, and it booted as the C: drive.

I thought for sure they would be the 'winner' as they were twice as fast as the Zip drives were.

I recall (and had a Jazz drive). I think I finally got rid of it circa 2014 or so. I dropped a bunch of old parts and computers off at Weird Stuff Warehouse. All the old ISA, EISA, SCSI, IDE, etc adapters and all that went along with it. I can't recall the last time I had used the Jazz drive, but I had only one disk for it and that got destroyed as I cleaned things out.

Navigating standards, drivers, compatibility from the late 80s to probably 2000ish was at times enjoyable, at times frustrating. Heck, sometime around said purge, I gave up on having a server at home as well -- too much effort trying to keep iTunes and media organized (my own cds, etc). Until this last month, I hadn't owned a tower. Just laptops (primarily macbooks) and SBCs like the Pi or BeagleBone.

I remember these! I thought at the time that they would for sure take off, but they never did. Even ZIP disks with a similar capacity and less convenient form factor seemed to gain more market traction.

I recall these being too expensive to be practical. All of these "next generation floppy" techs were living on borrowed time with CD burners and blanks dropping in price and broadband internet slowly starting to appear.

CD burners were never as convenient as floppies - you simply couldn't immediately save your work, eject and go. While CD burners had a role, what really killed the floppy were the USB sticks and broadband.

Nope, but at $1 per blank, it was pain we'd put up with to not spend $10 on a Zip disk.

Not at first.

And that after spending a small fortune on the CD writer.

But fairly shortly (a few years) afterward. Meanwhile Zip disks never came down in price, not even after they were obsolete.

In the CD era a lot of people was still using 1.44Mb floppies because of convenience. Burning a disk was "midly" expensive and they could just burn it once, so they were used as bulk backups or bulk media/game sharing, such as pirated games and later, console ROMs.

It was flash, however, that I think killed the Zip drive. Primarily in the form of USB sticks, CF, and SD cards. The digital camera played a big role, as these manufacturers were looking for photo storage solutions and the Zip was too big.

Iomega was working on the smaller Clik Drive but couldn't get it released before CF became the major player in cameras.

My personal feeling is that the Clik drive was not released because Iomega had just settled the "Click of Death" suit and they wanted the Clik Drive to have a very low, less than 1%, failure rate. It took around two years to bring the failure rate from around 1.5% to 1%.

The Zip drive did that reduction work while still shipping product.

I remember there being a few years from like 2002 to 2004 where it was clear Zip wasn't the answer (mostly because nobody had a Zip drive) but flash memory was too expensive.

Emailing files to yourself and Multi-sesion CD-Rs were popular for two or three years before suddenly everyone had USB drives.

Those early flash drives were so damn tiny. I still have a 128MB drive from when that was pretty impressive.

Those rewritable CDRs never worked that well. The price of regular CDR blanks dropped so hard that it was easier to burn a new disc each time.

My first drive was just 16MB; It was so useful.

And I never successfully used a rewritable CD, something always seemed to go wrong. I wasn't quite rich enough to burn a fresh disk each time, instead I would append new files to regular CDRs until it was full or I lost it.

In Norway, if I remember correctly, these showed up late for the party. Everybody and their dog already had zip drives, and then LS120 shows up, media twice as expensive, not a LS120 drive to be seen. Good luck gaining traction.

Then, of course, CD-R happened, and zip drives went the way of the dodo.

Most people I knew at the time bought this drive to add 1.44MB floppy capability to their iMac and rarely used the SuperDisk format itself.

... while matching their bondi/blueberry imac: https://www.retrocomputing.co.uk/2019/02/imation-superdisk-l...

We used the larger disks for backups, but I don't think we ever bought any more than the first pack of five. And I didn't know anyone else with one, so I couldn't use it to transfer data.

CD-R and CD-RW drives seem to be the winner from that era. But there were many popular floppy alternatives: Zip, Jazz, SuperDisk, and a few others I probably forgot.

Yeah, the jaz was more of a portable HD alternative.

SCSI interface and disk of 1GB spinning at 5400RPM!

It was awesome at the time and I remember ”multi booting” my Gateway 2000 with a jaz - RH Linux, Win95 & winNT on separate removable disks.

Did Jaz suffer from the same click-of-death issues as the Zip?

It did not. The Jaz had hard disk platters in the cartridge while the Zip had soft.

The "Click of Death" was actually not a single failure. The drive would click once when the head came out to read and then again when it parked. There were over 100 failure types that could cause the drive or disk to fail. When the drive did fail the drive would double click as the head came out, failed, then went back in.

The Zip drive failure rate was about 1.5% originally, then down below 1% by the settlement for "Click of Death".

Thanks! Jaz was outside my budget at the time, but interesting stuff!

Seemed to happen on a disk by disk basis for me, rather than on the drive as a whole. Guessing the failure rate was much higher than 1% for disks.

No, never for me at least. And I used 4 discs for a couple of years as harddrives.

The jaz drive/discs were of much higher quality from what you could tell from touch as well as price. :p

Before Zip’s time a bit, but I really liked Syquest’s 44 meg disk and drive. Compared to the Proapp 20 hard drive I’d had hooked up to my ][e, this felt like magic. Twice as much storage, just as fast, and removable?! Incredible!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyQuest_Technology

Those were fun times, in part due to the heterogeneity of hardware and operating systems. It seemed like every day there was some odd new device to discover. Even with today’s explosion of consumer electronics, for some reason it feels much more samey-samey than the old days to me.

Yeah SyQuests were big in the Mac realm, mainly due to graphic design/publishing people being the only desktop users at the time needing such massive capacity in a removeable format. My uncle had one and I thought it was the coolest thing ever.

Iomega had the Bernoulli drives, Zip, Jaz (with a gigabyte!) and Click. There was a bunch of MO formats that were popular in print/ad, a Panasonic phase-change media that looked a lot like MOs. I still have a SyQuest 3.5 magnetic drive.

With the click-of-death problem getting so much attention back then, branding their product Click may have been going a bridge too far.

Amusingly it was branded "clik!" complete with the exclamation https://www.imaging-resource.com/ACCS/CLIK/CLIK.HTM

Here is a blog of an Aussie bloke playing with a lot of old drive technology. SyQuests, Zips, Jazz, Superdisks, etc https://goughlui.com/2019/09/08/project-data-recovery-from-a...

I had one of these. I remember sharing files with my dad. Only really made sense for a short period before CD writers became less expensive.

I had one too. My favorite part was how smoothly the disk ejected.

The biggest problem that I had was not getting it to work in Slackware. It was probably my inexperience and lack of knowledge though.

Now the old retro computers use SDRAM cards for storage. I remember the Super Drive, it could not read GCR standard formats for the Macintosh or other computers only 720K and 1.44M floppies.

Nostalgia Nerd did a video on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtWjbmQPXHc

I had an Iomega Zip Drive. I think all my old QBasic code is stored on it. I do not know where my disks are now.

I guess I'll date myself and say I had good old tape backup via a Colorado drive.

I got MS-Office 4.3 Pro stored on a Zip drive with Access MDB databases I wrote in Access 2.0 on it as well.

I have a couple of those disks hanging around but the drive is nowhere to be seen.

I still have a parallel post SuperDisk drive in a box somewhere!

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