Forget SuperDisks -- Try 32MB On A Floppy

alanjstr writes: "IDG News is reporting that Matsushita (aka Panasonic) has developed a floppy drive that will fit 32 MB onto a regular floppy disk. 'To increase the data capacity of a standard floppy, Matsushita's FD32MB system employs zone bit recording -- a system used to encode data onto hard disks and optical disc systems that more efficiently uses the space to record data.' The new drive also supports SuperDisks for 240 MB storage capacity. A Google Search for 'FD32MB' turned up lots of stuff in Japanese. More details and discussion are available here starting back last November." According to the article which starts that PC Market thread, "The new technology increases the number of sectors per track to between 36-53 sectors, compared with its current number of 18 sectors, and its memory capacity per track can be raised from 9.2KB-18.4KB to 27KB." Imagine what the cooler-than-heck Linux Router Project could do with these!

Comments

Re:Reliable?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I agree - floppies are dead. Let them rest in piece.

They only survive today because PCs have piss-poor support for boot devices, hell I work with files all day that wouldn't even fit on a Zip250 much less a 32MB floppy.

32MB isn't enough for most OSes to boot from, and even for those that are small enough it'll still transfer over the floppy bus - painfully slow for 1.44MB of data, just as slow for 32MB of data. It should require new media in any case, much like you can't format a 1.44MB floppy 2.88MB in a 2.88 floppy drive.

Of course if it doesn't need new media then it'll probably live in the land pioneered by Commodore's SFD (or was that SDF? May have crossed wires with memories of Robotech/Macross) series drives. Same media as smaller density drives, massive capacity (My SFD-2002 stored 2MB on a 5.25" DD disk - in the early 80s), yet completely unreliable for prolonged access or long-term storage.

Just let the floppy die. The time would be better spent making USB/Firewire media bootable... (like they are on Macs)

ZIPs nearly made it?

[Hrunting]

Along came those crappy Zip-drives with 100 MB and they nearly made it 'cause they were relatively cheap and became almost ubiquitious. Iomega was smart and went for broad distribution over profits trying to become a standard but eventually their quality-control problems, competition, and internal problems overwhelmed them. Now their Zip drives have been passed by. They've tried variations - 200 MB Zips and 40 MB "Clicks" but the train has left the station.

I don't know where you've been, but I'd have to say that ZIP drives have been a phenomenal success. I've definitely seen more ZIP drives than SuperDisk drives. Mac and Dell and Gateway all offer them, and if you go to college these days, you seriously can't get by without a ZIP drive. At my school, all of them had one, and that was in 1997.

I'd say that ZIP drives made it all right.

Re:ZIPs nearly made it?

[maggard]

OK folks - the world is bigger then your own backyard. It doesn't matter if you, your school, your company, etc. use Zip disks the question is are they standard equipment on new computers as is the lowly 3.5" floppy.

No.

Yes there are places that Zips are common.

Printing is one of them. Of course before Zips were popular in printing Bournelli's were also popular as were optical drives - hardly good measures of wide-spread or long-lasting success.

Some schools went for them in a big way. They provided a way for students to transport files without the commitment and administration of a dedicated file server & remote access.

Business also bought into them to some degree, generally for off-line storage of marginal material. As they also came as a built-in on a number of Dell & other's business models they got into the workplace.

However in recent years built-in Zips have been largely supplanted by built-in CD-R/Ws. More reliable, cheaper media, stabler media, much more portable (more folks have a CD in their PC then a Zip.) Much of the Zip market is now replacement, folks with large libraries of Zip disks replacing older drives.

As time as gone on Zips have shown their problems. The "Click of Death". Disks that can be read on some drives but no others, buggy drivers, drives that wear out quickly.

I think anyone looking at today's market would agree that Zips are no longer a major product.

Did they succeed as a product? Yes - they became a brand name, sold lots, made some profit. However did they succeed as to replacing the floppy (the topic at hand) - no.

Indeed floppies themselves are becoming less & less a standard item. While Apple's iMac may have been the first to dispense with them they simply acted on what the rest of use know - floppies are going away.

How many times does a year does a generic person use their floppy drive? In a networked environment how hard would it be to get along without one? I've had to train folks on how to use their floppy drives because they've NEVER had to use one. These aren't newbies - they're folks used to working in networked large-file environments. I haven't seen any software on a floppy in years. Indeed aside from the occasional boot-disk or Mavica-picture I haven't stored anything on a floppy myself in years.

Zips had a good run but it's over. CD-RW, DVD-RW, solid-state, indeed with 80GB/7200RPM HDs selling for under US$200 external HD's are even a contender.

Re:ZIPs nearly made it?

[drinkypoo]

I'd say that ZIP drives made it all right.

Yeah, they made it "all right", but they didn't make it phenomenally, which is what they were after. They didn't do better than they ended up doing predominantly because of the click of death; I've had two drives succumb to that problem.

In the end, though, I still have three (working) zip drives; USB, Ext. SCSI, and Int. SCSI. I only use the USB one, but the others sit around waiting for the day when I need them.

I have Zip (and not Orb) because comparatively, everyone has a Zip. All the print shops have them, and so on. But not everyone actually has one, whereas everyone (except for Mac G3/G4 owners, typically) has a floppy drive. Floppies are largely useless for anything other than bootstrapping, but they do seem to get that particular job done in a barely acceptable fashion.

Zip would have "made it" if they had become the replacement for the floppy. So far, nothing has become the replacement for the floppy. What does something have to do to fill that void?

• It has to be cheap; No more than five times the cost of a floppy drive. That puts it between $35 and $50; Zip is STILL around $100.
• Media has to be cheap; Mo more than five times the cost of a floppy disk (IE, less than five dollars.) Zip media is $5 to $10, even today, which is almost cheap enough, but not quite.
• It has be be truly ubiquitous - everyone has to adopt it.
• You have to be able to boot from it. Zip at least has that going, though not on all models (obviously, booting from parallel is out, likewise USB.)
• It should be fairly speedy. We already know that Iomega can't make a fast removable media device. Period. Zip is agonizingly slow, Jaz is worse considering how much storage it has. By contrast, Syquest 135 (which died, sadly) was more reliable, over twice as fast as a zip, had more capacity, and media was about the same price. Too bad it came to market AFTER zip already had its toehold.
• It should be reliable. Zip was anything but. Can you say "Click of Death"? Or how about how zip disks just lose data over time, like floppies?

So, Zip meets none of the criteria. It's easy to see what happened there.

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ALL YOUR KARMA ARE BELONG TO US

How about an actually cool new media format?

[K8Fan]

At the Consumer Electronics Show, I saw the new DataPlay format. A lot of money behind it, tiny, rugged and 250 megs per side for a total of 500 megs in DVD-R format in a protected case the size of a Smart Card. See it at this web page.

It does have optional "content protection" but it shouldn't stop people from using for their own material. The engineers I talked with seemed pretty open to drivers being written for various operating systems (they want to sell hardware). Come September, expect to see these suckers all over the place.

This is pointless... (0, Redundant)

[caffeineboy]

As far as the LRP is concerned, they are using a floppy because:

• They want to have a filesystem that is immutable by setting the write protection on the floppy disc - get r00ted, just reboot.
• They want to be cheap. (this won't be)
• They run from a ramdisk for speed - just how much ram do you want to throw at this box that you are unwilling to put a HD in?

Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to buy a disk-on-chip for the same or less money, and thus eliminate both moving parts and a flimsy, unreliable boot drive? Hell, for the same money you could put in a boot CD and drive - pull the "ejectable" jumper on a drive so equipped and voilla!

This sounds like it will be as reliable in practice as say... 56K modems or some other such nasty kludge.

Please, don't buy this.. I beg you people

Remember the Floptical?

[Zalgon 26 McGee]

Back in the early 90's it was supposed to be the next big thing - 21Mb in a 3 1/2" form factor.

Never caught on. Unless there's a massive push on many fronts, this won't make it either. CDs are so cheap in quantity (just ask AOL) that the barrier to entry is high - why support a new format that no one uses?

Bad idea

[Animats]

Bad idea. High-density media need better protection for the media surface than the shutter on a floppy. There are lots of higher-density media with better packaging.

I have a box of 230MB Fujitsu magneto-optical disks in front of me, and those are five years old. Mountable SCSI device, too; you could put a bootable system on them.

Re:wow (aol floppies being useful again)

[StandardDeviant]

yeah, but floppies don't look as cool when you microwave them... ;-)

I remember back in "The Day" when I new some crazy kids in the dorm who wrote some sort of script to auto-order member kits from AOL, just for the floppies. They'd come back every week or so from the post office with an armload of the things. I don't think AOL every caught on, the mail room guys just got pissed so they quit.

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Fuck Censorship.

Re:Die Troll

[istartedi]

Why did you mod him down? duffbeer703 doesn't want the troll to die. It's German "Die Troll" for "The Troll". Right SideShowBob695?

(Please don't moderate this unless you are a Simpson's fan and get the joke.)

just great

[slashdoter]

just great, now I can lose 32mb of information with out reson

________

Reliability?

[Rares Marian]

On second thought, isn't that going to make it easier to destroy data accidentally?

Dr. Blow: Mr Bond, the disk.
Bond: Ok.
Chick: You bahstard.
Dr. Blow: Hey what's wrong with thing.
Bond: I told her to keep it in her purse hoping that by the time she retrieved it would be so mishandled as to be useless.
Chick and Dr. Blow: You Bahstard.

Reliable?

[cot]

I'm guessing these things aren't any more reliable than regular 1.44MB floppies.

That's as much of a reason for me welcoming the demise of floppies as their diminutive size.

We need something that is larger, as cheap, and more reliable. Wait a minute, how about CD-R(W)s?

They are the floppy replacement. Forget this kind of stuff.

Progress?

[maggard]

Ten years ago I could get a PC with a 2MB floppy on it. Later it became a 4 MB floppy drive. Then the vendors realized: Customers didn't care.

Floppies were popular 'cause they were ubiquitious - classic fax-machine effect. Without that they were just a pricy non-standard piece of equipment.

To succed they had to be cheap, rugged, and LOTS of folks had to have one.

Along came those crappy Zip-drives with 100 MB and they nearly made it 'cause they were relatively cheap and became almost ubiquitious. Iomega was smart and went for broad distribution over profits trying to become a standard but eventually their quality-control problems, competition, and internal problems overwhelmed them. Now their Zip drives have been passed by. They've tried variations - 200 MB Zips and 40 MB "Clicks" but the train has left the station.

Then the former folks from Syquest (the ones who pioneered much of the technology used in Zips but who lost out to Iomega in the consumer arena) came back with Castlewood and it's impressive Orb technology. 2 GB and fast with reasonably priced media but they don't have enough distribution to achieve broad penetration and without that they're just a niche product.

Also recently there was the SuperDisk - able to read a generic 1.44 3.5" floppy plus it's own 100 MB ones. Neat trick but with a standard floppy drive US$7, a USB version $40 for the iMac folks, and a known-quantity Zip for US$75 what was the point of shelling out US$200?

So now we've got another floppy contender. It's coming into a tough market.

CD-R/W offers 660 MB in a fairly standard format and at speeds up to 12x. Quality media is US$1-US$2, market penetration is high and there are even versions on digital cameras and other consumer devices now.

The DVD-R/CD-RW drives have just been introduced ofering high-speed play, reasonably fast recording, access to lots of devices and of course lots of storage.

On the other end we've got solid-state media expanding in density with 32 MB & 64 MB becoming popular at reasonable price points.

We've even started seeing USB-connected solid-state memory (see yesterday's /.) shipping for ~US$50 for 8 MB, surely larger is to follow.

What are the odds of another floppy-drive format making it?

Well, pretty slim. There are faster, and there are more capacity, and there are smaller form-factor, and there are more stable. With this new one excelling at none of these and only being so-so at all of them it seems destined for the also-ran list. It offers nothing that can't be gotten cheaper / more standard / more reliable / faster /etc. elsewhere.

Sorry.

Great price, terrible disks.

[SimplyCosmic]

While this is good news in terms of portable storage, the fact that it uses standard floppies is a bad thing, to me at least.

Maybe it's because the profit margin on the average floppy today is so small, or maybe it's just my imagination, but those disks just don't seem to last as long as they used to.

Nearly every day in the dorms, being the "computer geek" everyone knew, I'd get someone running down to me with a floppy that they had saved their 27 page final report on, that suddenly was showing disk errors. I shudder to think of the number of times I had to give them the bad news that floppies aren't the most reliable methods of storage anymore, and their work was lost.

So, this means 31 extra megs of term papers to lose. Joy!

Re:Great price, terrible disks. - 3M^H^HImation

[zeke]

That's exactly the same thing I thought upon reading the blurb. Years ago when I used an apple //c on a regular basis, I almost *never* had a disk go bad on me. Most of them - and I bought the crudiest, cheapest, $30-for-100-disks kind I could find - still work 15 years after I acquired them. Admittedly, we're talking ***LOW*** data storage rates, so perhaps the individual bits weren't as suceptible to random EM fields, but still...

In the early 90's when I started using msdos pc's, the 1.44 meg disks I bought were also pretty reliable. You could buy sony, fujitsu, 3M, etc. Most of those disks still work today.

Nowadays Imation (the-diskette-manufacturer-formerly-known-as-3M) has the cheap disk market pretty sewn up around here. Walmart, school bookstores, and corner convenience stores all seem to stock Imation disks and nothing else. The downside? I tend to get 1 or 2 bad diskettes from every box of 10 I buy. This is _straight_ out of the box. I stuff one in the drive, write something to it, and find out that it's immediately unretrievable.

Part of the trouble is the stinkin' cheap quality of the disks. If you have one, pull it out and try flexing it slightly. Note that the two halves of the disk shell are only connected together at the corners. Imagine how many dust particles get through the unsealed seam during regular use. Now imagine those dust particles carving deep trenches in the regions where your data is stored. Lovely.

If you have get one of these drives, be careful what brand media you buy for them.

zeke