News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk by ssl-3 on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @01:40AM (#39913976)
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

Re:The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk by mgk123 on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @02:14AM (#39914175)
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.

Re:The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk by ssl-3 on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @02:29AM (#39914252)
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.

Re:The Rise and Fall of 3M's Floppy Disk by phendrenad2 on Wednesday April 03, 2024 @12:32PM (#39919528)
Ah SuperDisk, I only know about it because there was a drive for the PowerBook G3.