LS-120: The 90s Super Floppy That Flopped

Among the different disk formats battling for attention in the 1990s, the LS-120 SuperDisk looked like it could be the true successor to the floppy...but ended up going nowhere.

Sources:
"Insite's Floptical Drive to Increase Storage Capacity," InfoWorld, August 15, 1988.
"Floptical Disk Drive Delivers 21MB of Storage," PC Magazine, May 26, 1992.
"486 Group to Discuss High-Density Drives," InfoWorld, April 3, 1989.
"Iomega's Floptical Drive: 21MB on One Disk," PC Magazine, June 29, 2993.
"High-Capacity Floppies Are Drives of the Future," InfoWorld, September 12, 1988.
"Is Iomega's Zip Tomorrow's Floppy Disk Drive?" PC Magazine, June 27, 1995.
"Vendors vie for floppy territory," Computerworld, July 8, 1996.
"New Superfloppy Contender," PC Magazine, October 6, 1998.
Boxed Caleb UHD144 drive photo: @foone on Twitter
"Caleb Technology Releases Monster Floppy," Computerworld, April 3, 2000.
"Sony and Fuji add third high-capacity drive to the fray," InfoWorld, October 27, 1997.
"Floppy Disk Drives," PC Magazine, March 9, 1999.
"Sony's 200MB Floppy Disk Drive," PC Magazine, May 4, 1999.
"Digital Point & Shoots," American Photo, July-August 2000.
"Inside Track," PC Magazine, February 23, 1999.

00:00 - Introduction
00:30 - Space battles
01:14 - The floptical option
02:33 - Good technology, bad implementation
03:03 - The launch of a super disk
03:35 - A battle on two fronts
06:36 - A glimmer of hope
09:23 - SuperDisk, take 2
10:07 - If not for Zip...

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[KomradeMikhail]

Missed the most important: The LS120 was supported in most PC BIOS natively, could be booted from, and did not require software.... even as recently as intel Haswell.

[Guilty_Feet]

My dad was the CEO for Caleb. He poorly miscalculated, but beyond the failures, his money was being embezzled through... We're not sure who. We do know that whoever did it left a comical amount of glassware that we believe was part of a laundering scheme of some sort.
Knowing what I know of my father now, it could have been him or it could have been the secretary he blamed it on.
He passed over a decade ago and we were living on his lies so it was hard to see them. But the business had far larger issues than their failed floppy.

[matthew.datcher]

I'm probably the only person crazy enough to have replaced a few PC floppy drives with LS-120 drives. It worked out well for me because we had bought dozens of the iMacs with SuperDrives at work. And, LS-120 didn't suffer from the "Click of Death."

[PsRohrbaugh]

I still have a LS120. It's better at reading really old floppies than a traditional floppy, as it uses the optical system to align the magnetic heads.

[haweater]

All these formats battled it out in the ad pages of those thick 1990's computer magazines. All those formats with the media cluttering your desk came to an untimely end, including the magazines themselves.

[yoruneko]

Maaan your diction is so pleasant to listen to, it's almost hypnotising.

[theinitiate]

I worked at Caleb Technology around ‘99-01, based in Boulder CO. We were developing a 144 mb floppy drive and getting ready to transition the product to mass manufacturing when the company just folded. My self, the head engineer and a few other were from Maxtor just up the road in Longmont, CO.

Probably for the best. We would have been crushed by the LS-120 and eventually usb thumb drives.

[markreed]

I started working for PC World here in the UK in 2004 and remember we sold external zip drives but we didn't sell many compared to CD writers.

[SpikeDiegel]

I had an LS 120 for years. That drive went into so many builds until I could not build with it anymore.

[assemblyassembly]

Hi, I'm Thea from St Paul. It's so cool seeing a local person doing what you do. Good job! I love watching your videos

[cooperhanke]

I remember these drives! My high school had created a computer lab, and we used these drives with our iMacs. Didn’t know there was even high capacity disks for these, and I’m guess the folks at the school didn’t know either!

[mikegreiling]

I literally just dug my old SuperDisk drive out of storage last week. Hadn’t thought about this device in almost 20 years

[ACRPC-dot-NET]

I have used LS120 ever since about 1999, still have one on my main modern desktop, though these days its primarily used to image 1.44m/720k disks (which it is fantastic at!).

[georgeh]

I love these videos. I considered the SuperDisk as well as Zip and some other removable hard disk cartridge drives. Ultimately I just waited until CD-R's became a thing. I was very close to buying the LS-120, though.

[fluffysheap]

I went straight from 1.44MB floppies to CDs.

I guess that's what most people did, because none of these disk formats really succeeded. I did know some people who had Zip drives, though.

Stuffing 32MB onto a traditional floppy is a neat trick! I would have certainly had a use for that, no matter how slow it was.

[IMDABROWN]

Forgot about the LS120's. I was an early adaptor of the parallel port and IDE Zip Drives.

[boydpukalo]

Awesome video and nice shot of the LS-240 drive. After watching last night I checked Amazon Japan for that model number and they had 2 new drives listed. Every time I had looked for a NOS LS-240 drive I came up empty handed. Been looking for 2 years. Ordered last night after learning waiting a couple hours you can lose out. I picked up a LS-120 drive last year and have most of the Iomega drives except Bernoulli. Also added Syquest and Castlewood drives to my collection. Still cannot find Sony HiFD drives nor do I remember them back in the early 2000’s. Thanks for the video. Long live floppies and their replacement spinning drives.

[tzutzumo]

My friend had the Iomega ZipDrive and i had the Panasonic LS120. Both were great backup devices. They had enough capacity and were relatively cheap. Today you always have to pay double the price. One SSD/HDD for use and another one for backup. What a crap. Great video!

[RikerJoe]

Great retrospective, Colin. I recall using ZIP in the mid-90’s simply because it was first to market with larger format disks. When I bought an iMac G3 Rev B in1998, I also bought a Super Disk external drive like you showed in your video (which I still have!) simply to have an external drive to read legacy floppies, and never thought about using the higher density media.

[richardmattocks]

The late 90’s to early 2000’s were a strange time for peripherals. Lots of promise but the tech just wasn’t there or was “almost” great.

I was a zip / cd user, these high-capacity floppies totally passed me by.