SuperDisk

It is one of the last examples of floptical technology, where lasers are used to guide a magnetic head which is much smaller than those used in traditional floppy disk drives.

The idea eventually ended up at 3M, where the concept was refined and the design was licensed to established floppy drive makers Matsushita and Mitsubishi.

[2] However, this higher density comes at a price – the entire disk must be rewritten any time a change is made, much like early CD-RW media.

[citation needed] The newer LS-240 drives also have the ability to read and write regular 1.44 MB floppies at much higher densities in a format called "FD32MB".

[citation needed] The true capacity of these "SD120MB" drives[5] is 120.375 MiB aka 126.22 MB (FAT16B with logical geometry 963/8/32 CHS × 512 bytes).

All drives can read and write 1.44 MB and 720 KiB MFM floppies, as used on PCs, Apple Macintoshes (High Density format only, see below), and many workstations.

Zip had enough popularity to leave the public mostly uninterested in SuperDisk, despite its superior design and its compatibility with the standard floppy disk.

They could both store massive numbers of drivers for installation purposes as well as be used to run live operating systems, such as ReactOS, which amounts to 150 MB.

Imation SuperDisk drive
An LS-120 disk
Circuit components of the external USB SuperDisk for Macintosh. The drive itself is the same size as a standard 3.5″ floppy drive, but uses an ATA interface. On the right is the USB-to-ATA adapter, which plugs into an intermediate fan-out and power supply daughterboard that is inside the rear of the Mac drive's casing. This particular drive cannot function using USB power alone.
This shows the technology of the SuperDisk drive. Two voice coil servomotors move the drive heads precisely across the disk surface.
BLUE - The main servo with a large coil provides the primary force to move the head mechanism.
YELLOW - A secondary smaller coil primarily acts to keep the head mechanism aligned parallel with the disk surface.
RED - The drive eject motor allows the disk to be under computer control so that it normally will not eject until the computer has completed its read or writing tasks.