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Today I was looking through my PC components trying to find a floppy drive to replace the one that died in my machine. Too badly I was out of the conventional floppy drives, but I did come across something I had forgotten about from years past, my old SuperDisk drive.

I decided to throw it in to my PC since I have not had the need to boot from floppy drives lately (which the SuperDisk does not handle well). The SuperDisk actually connects as an IDE device (not on the floppy drive channel), and that is where it gains its extra speed. Once I had it all fired up, I remember why it truly is a SuperDisk drive!

SuperDisk was an invention by Imation that was in the shadows thanks to the Zip drive. It came out a bit before the Zip drive, as I remember, but it gained less popularity and instead the Zip drive is what we all know of today.

The story on these drives really is back in the time before all our PCs had CD and DVD Burners that can burn up to 4.7gb at a time without breaking a sweat. It also was before we had all the USB flash sticks, and even USB mainstream for that matter. People were looking for a way to move more than 1.44mb at a time from computer to computer and there really was not an easy way besides networking (which ruled out portability) or using hot swap hard drives which were many times expensive.

That is where the Zip disk and SuperDisk came in. The SuperDisk came out with an amazing 120mb storage capacity and the early Zip came out with a 100mb capacity. In my mind, the amazing thing about the SuperDisk is that it still looks like a floppy disk, plus lets you use a standard 1.44mb floppy disk in the drive. When you put a normal floppy disk in the SuperDisk it is amazing how much faster you can read and write to it. You do not get anymore space (as you need to buy special SuperDisks for the SuperDisk drive to get 120mb), but you do get increased speed to and from the drive. The Zip drive on the other hand was a completely new disk that even though was roughly like a floppy disk, it could not read/write on floppy disks, only Zip disks.

In this picture you can see the size comparison of the different disks. The SuperDisk really is the same size as a normal floppy disk.

There were external and internal readers for both SuperDisks and Zip drives, but Zip drives seemed to be the one to take off being the more universal format of the time. I personally had an internal Zip 100 (which is the first, 100mb version (there since have been Zip 200 (200mb) and other larger capacity Zip drives made)), and an external model that actually ran off the parallel port since USB was not mainstream then. The more marketing and effort to get it out there that was put into the Zip drive made it become a success and world renowned in the the computer industry. Before CD, it was truly what you had to have if you wanted to easily travel with your files.

Now, this did not mean that either solution came up as being cheap. The Zip disks were still around $20 each, and the SuperDisks were even higher at times, usually around the $30. The drives themselves were also in the $100s depending on if you got an external or internal model. Now this is of course in their prime, and today you can pick up these disks and drives much cheaper. By today’s standards 100mb or 120mb seem like nothing, but back then it was awesome and breathtaking.

I thought I would do a little write up about this (to me at least) interesting and necessary part of the PC world. It was mobility at its beginning and has opened the doors for what most of us now use everyday. It brought the ideas of a portable disk to the mainstream, plus brought a new way to share your info with others.

Chris Leckness (3547 Posts) - Website | Twitter | Facebook

Chris Leckness is the Owner/Administrator of Mobilitysite. He is a Microsoft MVP, Mobile Devices and a member of the exclusive focus group, Mobius. Chris runs a Mobilitysite, GotZune, and a few other smaller sites and blogs. His personal blog is chris.leckness.com.