

Maxell versions of the disk are a few pence cheaper in small quantities. The disks retail for £6-£8.40 apiece, depending on the quantity you buy. Each SuperDisk diskette comes in its own plastic "jewel" case and has a lifetime warranty (I always wonder whose lifetime they're talking about). The actual SuperDisk diskette really is the same size (or unbelievably close to being the same size except for a slight extra "bulge" in the middle) as an old-fashioned floppy. The MSRP is £101 (although Imation warns that actual pricing may vary).


I'd guess its weight as somewhere around 1.5 to 2 pounds. The drive's enclosure is 5 by 7.5 by 1.4 inches. The outboard floppy drive that came with your notebook may physically be smaller, but the SuperDisk drive does a lot more. They recommend its use with desktop and notebook PCs that lack an onboard floppy drive, especially the super-thin ones. Imation claims its new drive reads data up to 22 times faster than a floppy drive.
Imation superdisk driver mac portable#
Now that USB ports are becoming standard fare on all PCs and Macs, Imation has come up with a new portable product that can be hot-swapped back and forth with ease. SuperDisk drives became so popular that Imation started making them to match iMac's "ice" colors. For a little more money, iMac buyers could get themselves not only a floppy drive, but also a fast 120MB floppy drive. It could market a USB version of its SuperDisk drives and fill a huge gap. That wildly popular desktop machine came with a CD-ROM drive, a USB port and an Ethernet port but no floppy drive. SuperDisk drives came into their own when Apple released the first iMac. Obviously, one 120MB SuperDisk can hold the same information as 83 old style floppies, but the big advantage here is that reading to and writing from a SuperDisk diskette is much, much, much faster.
Imation superdisk driver mac zip#
I think part of the thinking behind the number 120MB was that Zip disks, at that time, held 100MB. The Imation (3M Innovations) people created a drive that not only reads and writes to old-fashioned floppies, but also to their 120MB SuperDisk diskettes. Today, now that we use home networks, huge hard drives, CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs (you get the idea), floppies are way too small (1.44MB) and way too slow to use as your only removable media. That's especially true now that the computer industry has moved way past its old portable media standby, the floppy disk. And now, years later, I must agree that SuperDisks are a terrific idea. Luckily, the people at Imation never listened to me and never followed any such preconceived notions. That's why, a few years ago, I wondered whether other companies would try to make competing products. Like them or not, you have to admit that Zip drives and Zip disks revolutionised the portable computer storage industry.
