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Comment by zelphirkalt | Hacker News Reader

Couldn't we make a floppy disk sized and shaped thing, which can store much data than the usual floppy disk? Then one would have the same feel.

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Loads of companies tried back in the late 90's and through the very early 2000's. Zip disks, Jaz, Clik! All had the same problem, the drives needed to read them weren't found on every computer. The winners ended up being writable optical media and USB thumbdrives.

Personally, I wish someone would produce a consumer grade tape system, that doesn't cost an arm and a leg.

Hi-MD (introduced 2004, ~1 GB capacity when average HD's were running 200-300 GB) was never produced in a data version that I can tell, but even the original stored about 140 MB (in 1992, that was a lot of data in the size of a floppy and a far sturdier package). It wasn't a ton of space, but you didn't have to worry about static, or malicious devices masquerading as HID, and it was certainly good enough that if magneto-optical drives had been continuously developed, we'd be looking at pretty reasonable capacities today.

Yes, much lower capacity per dollar than silicon, but if it were very sturdy (it was) and offered near-infinite rewriteability (it did), it could have had a market.

You can format a Hi-MD for data. It's very slow by modern standards, especially in random access, and the media is so rare and thus costly there's no point except for the sake of it - I only have one, and at $60 a pop I wouldn't have any except that the seller I bought my MZ-RH1 from forgot to check if a disc was in it before shipping. But it works.

A modern development of that technology would have greater capacity, sure, but I can't imagine how it would approach the low random-access latency of solid-state media.

They did that back in the day, with the LS-120 and -240 "SuperDisk" and I think a couple of similar but even less well known systems. They used a secondary head tracking servo information on the medium in order to achieve tracking precision beyond what was available with the standard floppy design, and thus (no doubt along with reformulated media) write more information in the same area. They were back-compatible with regular 3.5" floppies, but they were also slow, flaky, expensive, and introduced after Zip disks but not long enough before writable CD media, and so they failed to compete.

If I were to do it today, I'd probably think in terms of USB, with an annular PCB loaded with flash chips in place of the disk medium, and a set of pads exposed by the slider to mate with pogo pins on the drive's head sled. (The PCB would be fixed in the disk case, with the central "cookie" remaining in place to mate with the drive spindle.) You'd almost certainly need to modify or replace the drive firmware, which in its default state would likely find this all very confusing, so it could spin the "disk" but avoid moving the heads (and thus interrupting connections and maybe also doing mechanical damage) and thus give the added realism of motor noises that stock USB drives just can't match. For extra bonus points (and a saleable product!) replace the firmware (and the onboard controller hardware) with something that can talk USB to the inserted "disk", and the native protocol out the board-edge connector to the computer in which the drive is installed - and then you have one of those "multidisk" devices for vintage machines, but one that actually uses a disk, and you can make a mint from retro nerds like me who enjoy old machines but are too busy to deal with them in their fully stock configuration. [1]

I'm the wrong kind of engineer for a project like this, but I wish I weren't, because it sounds like a lot of fun.

[1] Well, not me personally, because the only machine I still have with a 3.5" drive is a Toshiba Tecra from 1995 or so that uses all the exuberantly nonstandard interfaces one would expect of such a year. The internal floppy gave up the ghost ages ago, but an external one and an Ethernet PC card keep it able to talk to the world when it wants to. Heaven forfend its hard drive ever fail, though...

edits: correcting misrecalled SuperDisk technical details

LS-120 could also superformat a standard HD floppy to 30MB with the caveat that you had to write the whole disk in one pass.

Yeah even at the time there were magneto-optical disks[0], which I think got as high as around 9.1gb. I had a bunch ranging from 120-480mb, which was huge at the time. They are a bit thicker than a regular floppy, but nearly the same form factor. Awesome at the time for backups and of course very useful for print/publishing businesses that had to courier over huge 300dpi documents to print, stuff like that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive

Wow. I totally had blocked those out of my memory.

I deployed a batch of desktops to an office with the drives and 1 disk each. We hoarded the disks of course.

I think I mostly just fidgeted with them at my desk since we just had a few machines that could use them.

They were more reliable than our external SATA CD burner (Smart & Friendly brand), though. That had its own table we wouldn’t touch while burning at 1x. It could 2x but the failure rate was too high and CDRs were still expensive. Zip drives were for peasants being mostly parallel or IDE. :)

I like that idea. While everyone here seems to comment and mention old competing formats, I imagine a new floppy disc-like device with an SSD inside, kinda like an HDD cartridge. Area-wise a 3,5" could easily house TBs worth of storage, and the "metal clip" of the floppy could house some kind of m2 interface when opened...

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