
SuperDisk - peter_d_sherman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk
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scrollaway
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](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...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eg8tK1LpLS8&list=PLv0jwu7G_DFUoByWSHHoSTlUIxY7VkJLi)

~~~
daniel-thompson
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](https://www.youtube.com/user/XboxAhoy)

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

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barrkel
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.

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

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aeyes
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.

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yownie
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

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codazoda
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.

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ganstyles
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!

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geogra4
A true shame that both local ISPs and computer parts stores have mostly
vanished

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rbanffy
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.

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dehrmann
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](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.

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p_l
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.

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

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fit2rule
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 ..

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tomatocracy
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.

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hoistbypetard
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.

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bluedino
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.

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jmspring
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.

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FreakyT
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.

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dragontamer
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.

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jordanbeiber
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.

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

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codazoda
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".

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ericd
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.

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rasz
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...](https://goughlui.com/2019/09/08/project-data-recovery-from-a-well-
travelled-artistic-syquest-sq400-44mb-cartridge/)

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s0rce
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.

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mmcgaha
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.

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cable2600
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.

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nayuki
Nostalgia Nerd did a video on this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtWjbmQPXHc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtWjbmQPXHc)

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benibela
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.

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

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Teknoman117
I have a couple of those disks hanging around but the drive is nowhere to be
seen.

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dblohm7
I still have a parallel post SuperDisk drive in a box somewhere!

