Reading floppy disks? GOTTA GO FAST!

This is a video I've wanted to make for several years, ever since I discovered my Mavica had a high speed drive in it. As cool as all of these are, it's still frustrating that they simply never became mainstream.

Floppy drives could have been improved before the end of the eighties, there was really no reason for them to stay so slow except maybe controller limitations, and that limitation could have been resolved as well. Instead, we kept using the same crap well into the 90s, and it became impossible to replace. Ain't that always the way?

Chapters:
00:00 Intro & background
03:30 Defining "1X floppy speed"
10:40 Sony 2X floppy drive
12:33 Faster drives
13:14 "4X" Mavica
18:34 Other 4X drives
19:40 LS120 drive
26:00 Conclusion

Alright, here's the drives I used:
Dell: FDDM-101 / MPF82E - I THINK there may be some of these without the USB... or maybe there's a very similar looking drive with a different model number that lacks the USB, I can't remember for sure. Nobody bothers photographing the USB plug on ebay to confirm, so... Good Luck!

Toshiba: PA3109U-1FDD - Not that you'd want this one.

Sony: MPF88E - I've confirmed that this one IS supposed to have a big "2X" plate on top, so all the ones you see on ebay will look different.

And some drives I don't have:
Smartdisk FDUSB-TM2 / FDUSB-B2 - 2X drive, ostensibly.
Sabrent FL-UDRV - 2X drive, ostensibly.
Targus 420-0448-002C - 2X drive, ostensible.

Y-E Data yd-8u14 - This is the 4X model, there are 2X and 1X as well with different model numbers.

Fastcache 10X - Let me know if you ever find one, or even see one.

[tehlaser]

I worked at Iomega in the late 90s. Prior to that, they had their own floptical product, something like 20 MB. It had, well, flopt by the time I was there, but the hardware and media were still around internally, and some of the software still supported them. Unlike LS120, the disks for the Iomega floptical felt exactly like ordinary floppy disks. That might’ve just been because they were prototypes using off the shelf floppy tooling or something. That was actually a bit of a problem, as you had to look carefully to know what kind of media you had. I got used to sliding the door open and looking through the media held up to a light to tell the things apart by color. And yeah, the drives could read and write ordinary floppies too. I have no idea what the speed was like, but can confirm that they sounded amazing.

I suspect the reason backwards-compatible superfloppies (and high-speed floppy drives) mostly failed is a branding/marketing thing. The floppy form factor had been around for SO LONG people just knew what they were. “Floppies” had become throughly commoditized things by then. You can’t brag to your geek friends about your cool new thing when it looks and feels at best like a bog-standard floppy, and at worst like a cheap knockoff. Overcoming that would’ve been difficult, though yeah, it certainly didn’t help that nobody thought to write “4x” all over the product.

I suspect Zip had better success largely because it felt *different* than floppies. I’m obviously biased as hell, but to me they felt more satisfying to use. People could see one from a distance and go “hey, what’s that?”

[lululombard]

I still don't understand why manufacturers didn't put a massive "2X" or "4X" on the faster drives like they did with CD drives like you said. It would have been a huge deal for a small software developer that makes dozen and dozen of copies! Excellent video!

[vwestlife]

I have an old ThinkPad made during the brief period when they were available with an LS240 drive. It has two drive bays, so guess what I did? I put *two* LS240 drives in it. It's the fastest way I've ever seen to copy floppy disks!

[scott]

I was really sick the other night and the only way I could get my mind off the body aches and shivering was a Cathode Ray Dude video marathon. These videos always comfort me for some reason. Thank you.

[dixiewexworth]

Back when I was a youngin... my techie/ham radio grandpa convinced me that ZIP drives were called that because when ejected them the spring was so strong it would "Zip" across the room, followed by a demonstration of his drive doing just that. I believed that definition for YEARS.

[justNotSure]

You are right, your Sony is missing a plastic trim which states 2x.

BTW, the reason it's a detachable trim was because you could choose between either the white or blue one.

[AnonymousFreakYT]

My favorite is the LS-120's successor, the LS-240. One super-interesting thing it could do is you could format regular 1.44 MB disks as *32 MB* disks. Needless to say, you needed another LS-240 drive to read it back, but it was ridiculously useful back in the day, instantly turning your old 1.44MB floppies into something far more useful. (But the 32 MB formatting made it behave like an early CD-RW - you had to reformat and rewrite the entire disk any time you wanted to change data.)

The big problem with LS-240 is its rarity - it was only sold in Asia/Pacific, and was only on the market about two years. LS-120 drives are easy enough to find, if a little expensive at times; LS-240 drives almost never show up for sale, and are hideously expensive when they do.

[---liyn]

You should get an LS-240 drive and play with the "FD32" format that allows it to store 32MB on normal floppies. SMR (shingled magnetic recording) way before it was ever used in hard drives...

[volvo]

Growing up with floppy drives, when I found the 4x floppy in the sony mavica camera I was amazed they never became popular. Taking a picture and hearing all those quick clicks is awesome.

[NFNERF]

How do you only have 80k subscribers? This production value-- these low-level, in-depth explanations written to bring the viewer into your yarn and have them on the edge of their seat like they're in another era, seeing these amazing technologies with a glitter in their eyes looking towards the future that they could only imagine, and that we now live in. I'm glad that you appreciate these 'archaic' technologies, and see them for the value they had in the world they ruled.

Edit:
"Yes, it sounds cool as hell" best quote ever

[tituslafrombois]

I've always wanted an LS-120 drive for myself. When I was younger and stupid I saw one at a local thrift shop, complete in box, but it said "For Mac" so I assumed it wouldn't work on a PC at all and didn't get it. The SuperDrive came from that weird era where "it has USB" meant "it's made for Macs"

[A_Casual_NPC]

I checked YouTube to see if there was a technology connections video but found a new cathode Ray dude video. I genuinely went "That's even better"

Kuddos to you mate

[nrdesign]

The laptop floppy drith with the USB on its side - we had one exactly like this at work, when the only oscilloscope we had available was an old Tektronix TDS520. The only viable way to take screenshots is to store it on floppy on its built-in drive, then transfer the images to a PC with the USB floppy

[jdatlas]

I’m immediately intrigued. I don’t actually have anything that can read floppies, nor do I have many of them, but still. I’m basically trying to live vicariously through retro YouTubers to make up for the fact I don’t have the space for a collection of my own.

[FreudianSlipDK]

Man kudos.
You literally got a golf clap from me here while watching it.
I don't think I've heard anyone so much as mention BeOS in close to two decades.
And yes i actually ran it and have the install media somewhere :)

[willgilligan]

I absolutely love your videos. From your delivery it is very obvious how passionate you are about all of the retro stuff, and you are able to share that passion in the way you communicate. You have very quickly become my 'fav' retro tech channel ( sorry LGR, Techmoan, 8-bit Guy, etc.). Keep up the good work!

[karmatose]

The biggest take away from this video for me was that I had one of those Dell floppy drives and had NO IDEA that it had a usb port on the side (because why would you even look for that?!). I don't even have a laptop to shove it in, it was literally just e-waste for me and now I have a perfectly usable usb floppy drive! Thanks for that!!

[GreatDogs]

Compaq sold LS120 as a workstation option. Their implementation was very good. Fast and easy to use with no FDD. The users didnt even know they had it. Support could come in behind and image. The whole drive with a floppy (ls120) .. It was sad that zip beat them out. ... That drive was IDE by the way.

[endymallorn]

I can tell you a few things from my corner of the world about this and my experience as one of the last floppy users.

Some users I knew, myself included, were actually leery of 2X & 4X drives up until the end, because we'd been soured by things the early ones did. Reduced disk cache, omitting a parity-check routine, even running the disk too fast and damaging either the spindle or the platter were common in anything that advertised itself on speed. So if I look at a floppy drive and I see an emphasis on speed over accuracy, I'm going to go the other way. That's why they go out of their way to hide it, because it's a mark of shame - write accuracy and disk longevity were always the name of the game.

When we come to the LS120, or as I called the serial one I had, The Disk Muncher - because that's what it did. Anything that wasn't either a brand-new disk or LS120 media, it overspun and did major damage to the disk when it did any I/O operation. Obviously, this was not good. Later models of the drive weren't as bad, but would still reduce the life span of floppies. When you're talking pure data preservation, obviously you're less likely to care if you can read it a second time or if you can go back and forth safely - you only read from 0 to whatever., When you use it for a game which has regular operations and uses the disk for graphics, audio, and state data, the way the drive interacts with the disk matters a lot, and one bad spin leads to a dead disk. I know that LS120 media & drives were good for techs though (that's why we had the drive actually), because with the speed you noted, setting up new PC images was a lot faster - a handful of LS120 disks could take the place of a briefcase full of standard floppies, so you would just copy your Norton Ghost image from the disks to the machine in no time, and be done with the matter. Hence the need for an option to boot from serial LS120 in various types of BIOS at the time. It was definitely not the linear upgrade path you're thinking it to be. Plus, on top of all those issues, the drives and media might have been made cheaply, but they were not cheap to buy. In the era where a good, reliable floppy drive from a known brand could be found for $10 (less at a show), there was just no reason for many users to move over to a more expensive drive with newer, more expensive media just because programmers have forgotten what the world "optimization" means.

That's just what I know, though, and the world may say differently.

[finkelmana]

I remember seeing an advertisement around 1996 for HD floppy drives that had 2 MB of cache memory. Inserting a disk would load the entire disk into the cache and can be worked on completely in cache. Obviously, these were geared for high end duplication with a high end price.