Floppy drives outdated

Electronic News, Nov 25, 1996 by Norm Bogen

No storage technology has endured so long with so few improvements as the 3.5-inch floppy drive. While floppy-disk capacity remains stuck at 1.44 megabytes, hard disk capacities have soared from 20MB in 1984 to more than 2 gigabytes today. This trend makes it impractical to back up a hard drive with standard 1.44MB, 3.5-inch disks. In addition, the huge file sizes of multimedia applications, and mountains of downloadable data from the Internet and private on-line services, demand even more storage space.

With this need in mind, In-Stat forecasts shipments of high-capacity, removable-media drives will grow rapidly. These devices could even replace the standard floppy drive as we know it today. More than 3 million Iomega Zip drives have already sold as an aftermarket product that plugs into a parallel or SCSI port, and there are now internal SCSI and IDE models available.

As is usual in the PC market, several vendors with different technologies are jockeying for the lead, hoping to establish a new standard.

Iomega introduced the 100MB Zip drive in early 1995. The Zip stores more than 70 times that of a 1.44MB diskette and is several times faster. However, they are not bootable; therefore, they cannot function as the a: drive of a PC. Nor can the Zip drive read/write to the installed base of 3.5-inch, 1.44MB disks. The result: PCs using a Zip drive must also have a standard floppy drive.

SyQuest Technologies has done reasonably well with its proprietary 135MB drive, now a standard product within the professional graphics arts and publishing markets, despite similar limitations.

There is a new kind of drive and media, backed by Imation (formerly the disk products division of 3M), Compaq Computer, OR Technology and Matsushita: LS-120 drives (the "LS" stands for laser servo). LS-120 drives can read and write to the older 3.5-inch, 1.44MB disks and the 720-kilobyte, DOS-formatted disks, and, with the right BIOS, are bootable and can function as the a: drive of a PC. The LS-120 disks have a 120MB capacity. Ultimately, the LS-120 can replace the standard 1.44MB floppy drive; they are already shipping with Compaq Deskpro 5133-1200/LS and 5166-2000/LS PCs.

Mitsumi, a major floppy drive manufacturer, and Swan Instruments are developing yet another alternative high-capacity, removable-media drive using their own propriety technology. Their drives, planned for shipment in mid-1997, will support media that stores 130MB of data. It will also be backward-compatible with 1.44MB disks.

The Zip (100MB capacity) and LS-120 drives are comparably priced: estimated street price of $199 for the Zip, $210 for the LS-120. Media costs are also similar: between $15 and $20. But the LS-120 drive has some key advantages over the Zip drive: compatibility with standard 3.5-inch drives, the ability to boot a PC and initially engineered for internal use. Zip drives were originally designed for external use, although efforts are now under way to make Zip drives bootable. Until then, Iomega must rely on the competitive advantages of greater speed (Zips are twice as fast) and brand awareness.

The market for high-capacity, removable-media drives is dynamic. Iomega has blazed a new trail with the Zip drive, but LS-120 proponents aim to replace existing floppy drive technology, while curbing the market for proprietary drives from Iomega and SyQuest. To replace these drives with LS-120s, broad-based support from drive and media manufacturers is a must. Mitsubishi and Maxell have announced they would make LS-120 drives and media, respectively. In-Stat expects further announcements soon from major drive manufacturers, as well as PC OEMs.

The future looks bleak for the standard 1.44MB floppy disk drives, even though more than 80 million shipped worldwide in 1995. In-Stat expects high-capacity, removable-media drives to supersede standard floppy drives within the next few years.