PC Hardware in a Nutshell, Second Edition

Chapter 7. High-Capacity Floppy Disk Drives

Many vendors have tried and failed to establish a standard for a high-capacity FDD. All these so-called superfloppy drives have suffered from some combination of nonstandardization, incompatibility with standard diskettes, lack of boot support, expensive media, small installed base, lack of OEM acceptance, low reliability, and poor performance.

Iomega Zip Drives and, to a lesser extent, Panasonic SuperDisk (Imation LS-120) Drives have sold in moderate numbers, especially in some niche markets. Others, such as the fast, 200 MB Sony HiFD and the Samsung Pro-FD had features that compared favorably to the Zip Drives and SuperDisk Drives, but either never shipped in volume or were not adopted in numbers large enough to reach critical mass. The story of high-capacity FDDs has largely been one of too little, too late, and too expensive.

The ubiquity of inexpensive, fast, reliable CD-RW drives has effectively killed the market for high-capacity FDDs except in specialized niches such as pre-press graphics work, which remains a Zip Drive stronghold. In what may be the final straw, Iomega settled a class action lawsuit in spring 2001 filed on behalf of those who had purchased Zip Drives between 1995 and 2001. In settling that lawsuit, Iomega in effect admitted that Zip Drives and disks were unreliable, which doesn’t bode well for the continuing existence of the Zip Drive.

All of that said, there are a (very) few applications where high-capacity ...