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Scrap the old floppy. Get the new kind.
   technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

Imation SuperDisk: At last, a high-capacity replacement for the lame old floppy


March 19, 2000

By Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, Al Fasoldt
Copyright ©2000, The Syracuse Newspapers

   Anybody here still use floppy disks any more?
   They're ridiculous. Nothing seems to fit on a floppy disk any more. Files you download usually won't. Pictures you scan won't. MP3 files your kids get off the Internet seldom fit, either.
   What's a politically correct PC user to do?
   Scrap the old floppy. Get the new kind.
   And I don't mean a Zip disk. Zip drives have a major problem.
   Lots of people have Zip drives -- they come with some of the newest PCs and have been added to older PCs and Macs all over the world. Zip drives use Zip disks to hold either 100 or 250 megabytes of data on a disk that looks very much like the familiar floppy.
   Zip drives are chic. They're in.
   Phooey!
   A Zip disk might look like the familiar floppy disk in some ways but it's clearly not the familiar floppy if you try, as I did once, to get a standard old floppy disk to fit into a Zip drive. No way. Nada. Iomega, the company that invented the Zip drive, missed the point when it designed things.
   You can't take out your standard old floppy drive and stick in a Zip drive. If you do that, you don't have a floppy drive at all. The Zip drive can't function as both a Zip drive and a floppy drive.
   But the folks at Imation have a solution. They make the SuperDisk drive, which can use regular old floppy disks or fancy new SuperDisks. These new kind of floppies hold 120 megabytes. You can hook up a SuperDisk drive with a USB cable or plug it into the printer port (a bad idea, which we'll get to later), or you can put it into your PC in place of the floppy drive that came with your computer.
   You can hook up a SuperDisk drive by a PC Card (or PCMCIA card, the old name for a notebook-computer adaptor) or by a SCSI connection, too, if you want. (Yes, that word is pronounced "scuzzy." It's a way of hooking up all sorts of things to your PC or Mac.)
   SuperDisk drives cost about $100 for an internal version on up to about $200 for a fancier external version. (Prices seemed to vary a lot, so do careful shopping.) Disks cost $6 to $7 each if you shop around.
   I've been using a SuperDisk drive for a few months and love it. I have the USB version, the only version that makes sense if you have a modern PC or Mac. (PCs and Macs made in the last few years have USB connections. Trivia fans might want to know that it stands for Universal Serial Bus. Nobody will ever ask you what that means otherwise, so don't memorize it.)
   The great thing about USB devices -- scanners, little video cameras, CD recorders and so on -- is that they just plain work. You plug them in at any time (even while your PC or Mac is running) and they start doing their thing. I downloaded new USB drivers from the Imation Web site before I plugged the drive in, and that was that.
   The drive worked very nicely. It made click-a-chug noises now and then and sometimes paused to catch its breath when I was copying a lot of files, but otherwise it was a model of good manners. It was about as fast as a slow hard drive in most cases, which turned out to be acceptable. When I snapped in a regular old floppy, the SuperDisk drive copied files and read them back much faster than my normal floppy drive does.
   The USB version of the SuperDisk drive works on both a PC and a Mac. This might be a genuine career saver for someone who uses a Mac at home and a PC at the office and needs to ship gigantic files back and forth. (Don't be fooled by the Apple-inspired colors of the Imation SuperDisk drive sold especially for USB-equipped Macs; it's the same inside as the dull looking PC version.)
   I mentioned earlier that the printer-port version of the SuperDisk drive is a bad idea. The parallel port (printer port) of PCs wasn't designed for disk drives. It's for printers. My advice applies to ALL non-printer devices that can be hooked up to the printer port. Don't do it if you can avoid it. (Don't attach a scanner there, in other words.) Always use USB if your PC has USB.