Floptical
 |
The 21MB Floptical 3½-inch disk |
Floptical drives combine magnetic and optical technologies to store large amounts of data on a media similar to 3½-inch
floppy disks. The name refers specifically to one brand of drive, but is also used more generically to refer to any system using similar techniques.
The original Floptical technology was introduced late in
1991 by
Insite Peripherals, a
venture funded company set up by
Jim Adkisson, one of the key engineers behind the original 5¼-inch floppy disk drive development at
Shugart Associates in
1976. The main shareholders were
Maxell and
3M.
The technology involved reading and writing data magnetically, while optically aligning the read/write head in the drive using grooves in the disc being sensed by an infra-red LED. The magnetic head touched the recording surface, as it does in a normal floppy drive. The optical servo tracks allowed for an increase in the tracking precision of the magnetic head, from the usual 135 tracks per inch to 1,250 tracks per inch. Floptical disks provided 21MB of storage. The drive had a second set of read/write heads so that it could read from and write to standard 720KB and 1.44MB disks as well.
To allow for a high degree of compatibility with existing
SCSI host adapters, Floptical drives were designed to work as a floppy, and not as a removable
hard disk. To ensure this, a "write lockout" feature was added in the
firmware. This effectively inhibitted writing (including any kind of
formatting) of the media. It was possible to unlock the drive by issuing a
SCSI Mode Sense Command,
1A 00 20 02 A0. It is unclear how much of a problem this was, and Insite also issued
EPROMs where this "feature" was not present.
Insite licenced the floptical technology to a number of companies, including
Matsushita,
Iomega,
Maxell/
Hitachi and others. A number of these companies later formed the
Floptical Technology Association, or
FTA, to try to have the format adopted as a floppy replacement.
Around 70,000 Insite flopticals are believed to have been sold worldwide in the product's lifetime.
Silicon Graphics used them in their
SGI Indigo and
SGI Indy series of
computer workstations. It was also reported that
Commodore International had selected the Insite Floptical for its
Amiga 3000 [
1]. However this did not take place, and while Flopticals were installed in many Amiga systems, they were sold by either Insite, TTR Development or Digital Micronics (DMI), and not bundled by Commodore.
The product had lingering quality and reliability issues, and was generally much slower than other technologies such as the
Iomega ZIP. In fact, while Iomega licensed the floptical technology as early as 1989 and produced a compatible drive known as the
Insider, they later dropped it to focus on the ZIP system. ZIP would go on to sell into the tens of millions.
A number of other companies also introduced non-compatible floptical-like systems. Most popular of these, by far, was the
Imation LS-120 SuperDisk. The LS-120 stored 120 MB of data while retaining the ability to work with normal 3½-inch disks, interfacing as a standard floppy for better compatibility. There was serious consideration that the LS-120 would succeed where the Floptical failed and replace the floppy disk outright, but the rapid introduction of writable
CD-ROM systems in the early 2000's made the market disappear.
Sony also tried their own floptical-based format, the
Sony HiFD, but quality control problems ruined its reputation. A smaller competitor is the almost unknown
Caleb UHD144.
MiB>| Formatted | 20,385 KiB |
| Rotational speed | 720 RPM |
| Track density | 1250 TPI |
| Recording density | 23980 BPI (RLL) |
| Transfer from disk | 1.6 Mbit/s |
| Buffer transfer rate | 2 Mbyte/s |
| Average seek time | 65 ms |
| Settle time | 15 ms |
| Motor start time | 750 ms |
| No. of heads | 2 |
| Cylinders | 755 |
| Sectors per track | 27 |
| Sector size | 512 bytes |
| Interface | SCSI |
*
Magneto-optical drive
