The SuperDisk technology was based on floptical principles, where lasers were used to guide a magnetic head that was much smaller than those used in traditional floppy disk drives. The idea originated from an early 1990s project at Iomega, but was abandoned when they decided to release the Zip drive in 1994. The concept was later refined by 3M and licensed to Matsushita and Mitsubishi. The SuperDisk drive had a USB-to-ATA adapter that allowed it to connect to Macintosh computers via the USB port. The drive itself was the same size as a standard 3.5" floppy drive, but used an ATA interface.
The SuperDisk format had little success in North America, where it faced competition from the Zip drive and the falling prices of CD-R drives. Only a few OEMs, such as Compaq, Gateway and Dell, supported it. It was more successful in Asia and Australia, where a second-generation SuperDisk LS-240 drive and disk was released. The LS-240 had double the capacity of the LS-120 and could format regular floppy disks to 32 MB capacity. However, this feature required rewriting the entire disk every time a change was made, much like early CD-RW media. A SuperDisk drive was also used in two Panasonic digital cameras, the PV-SD4090 and PV-SD5000, which allowed them to use both SuperDisk and floppy disks as the memory media.
The SuperDisk LS-120 drive for Mac came with a user manual and a device driver that enabled it to work with Mac OS 8.6 or later. The driver also allowed the user to format SuperDisk disks and check their status. The drive could be powered by either the USB port or an external AC adapter. The SuperDisk LS-120 drive for Mac was compatible with most Macintosh models that had a USB port, such as the iMac, Power Mac G3, PowerBook G3, iBook and Power Mac G4.
The Imation Imation Ls-120 Superdisk For Mac was a versatile device that offered both backward compatibility and increased storage capacity for Mac users. It was one of the last examples of floptical technology, which combined laser and magnetic technologies to achieve higher densities than conventional floppy disks. Although it did not achieve widespread popularity, it was a useful product for those who needed to transfer data between different formats or devices.
References
Imation SuperDisk LS-120 Drivers Device Drivers
SuperDisk - Wikipedia
Imation SuperDisk LS-120 User Manual
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