Really? On a regular disk? I thought the upper limit was ~2.7M

Yes, their LS-120 drives could store ~120MB on a special disk, or allegedly 32MB on a regular 3.5" high-density disk[1]. It used SMR recording just like the modern spinny-rust hard drives of late that none of us particularly like to accomplish the latter trick.

(I owned an ATAPI variant of this drive for time, but I sadly only ever used it for reading and writing normal disks of normal formatting.)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk

The "FD32" 32MB capability was only implemented on the last drives which could also use 240MB disks.

Maybe the earlier 120MB drive hardware could have been physically capable of it but the drive firmware did not support it.

I appreciate the correction.

Eventually, right here, we'll all collectively remember the whole truth about the mysteries of this conglomerated and seldom-used removable media format.

Ah SuperDisk, I only know about it because there was a drive for the PowerBook G3.

I was excited about the LS-120 but I never quite convinced myself to stump up the money to pay for it.

My recollection was that it was: - Slightly larger than the contemporary Zip disks. - Cheaper than a Zip drive. - Could just replace your existing floppy drive, since it was backwards-compatible.

I don't know if it was as fast or robust as a Zip disk - it definitely didn't have the same mind share, though.

Robustness was "fine"; anything was more robust than a lot of the cheap floppies that were around in the mid-to-late 90s (though Zip drives manufactured around 2000 had a reputation for failing more often).

I wish that MiniDisc Data had been more widespread and faster - great size and amazing robustness. Unfortunately, AFAICT they topped out at 600 kB/s speed.