Cool new LS-240 drive that uses 240 MB disks and reformats standard floppies to 32 MB's !

[Rainguy]

Looks to be very cool at $175.95 since you can use all those old floppies, and if your friend or business acquaintance gets one, you could give him some disks with 32 MB's each and not have to worry about getting it back. Then use some 240 MB disks or bigger stuff for yourself. They also read standard floppy disks. I guess the more people that buy in to this and the units sell...the cheaper the drives will get. I always have thought that this is Iomega's biggest mistake in not providing a smaller MB disk (say 10-20 MB's) that is cheap and disposable like the floppy and that could be read in their 100 and 250 MB drives.

Anyway you can get it here and read the rest of the specs.

 

[YisSerL]

It'll be great if I can convert all those floppies laying around in my closet to 32MB disk. Sounds interesting.

 

[riznick]

i wonder if it reads the old ls-120 disks.

Edit: yup it does...

 

[riznick]

cool, just read the specs, and it does support ls-120 disks. I love the ls-120 drives. They read floppy disks about 10 times faster than a regular floppy drive. They read and write ls disks at a very fast rate, comparable to that of an internal zip drive.

External zip drives, in my experience, are way to slow.

I've had an ls-120 drive for about 4 years now, and am surprised that not many people have them at all. I thought by now, no computers would have the floppy controller at all, and we would all have the ide ls drives to do the floppy disk support. I was wrong. At least this ls-240 shines a new light of hope on such a promising product.

 

[Rainguy]

Yes, it reads LS-120 and LS-240 disks, reg 720 and 1.44 floppies, and the floppies formated to 32 MB's.

 

[YisSerL]

Yeah, it reads LS-120 disk also.

Here's the product info pdf: LS-240

 

[cb4800]

This format is not very stable. The drive has a VERY small read/write tolerance for a standard floppy disk that was not designed for such use. If you look around on the net you can find some articles about it.

But yeah, the one really good thing is that the media is almost free, but so are CDs.

 

[zmatrix]

Regular floppies are unreliable as they are now. How can they format those suckers to 32MB? Plus, I wouldn't put anything important on my floppies anyways let alone, use them.

 

[littlebig]

If you want really reliable removable media, try MOs (Magneto-Optical).
They've been around more than 10 years and very mature format, and VERY RELIABLE.
You can grab 128MB or 230MB MO @ ~$10-20 (DRIVE not disk!) at eBay.
Or, you can find 640MB new one at ~$200, or at ~$50 used one. 1.2GB's are bit expensive (~$300) but worth every penny.
Media is pretty cheap too. 5 box of 640MB at $40.

They are really popular in Japan. I'm wondering why they didn't make any market in US.

 

[UWDawg]

Cool, I thought the LS-120 died out.

 

[randomlinh]

I liked MO too, before cdrs were under $1000.. hehe... but cdr dropped in price, and was much much more versitile. Another thing that caught on in Japan but not here.. MD.. i love MD.. but it's too darn expensive

 

[Triggerhappy007]

This sounds cool, would be really nice for a laptop, but price is too high. Since it reformat at 1.44MB to 32MB, I bet it can reformat a superdisk to 2.67GB, hehe, j/k.

I hope this comes down to $100 soon.

 

[Triggerhappy007]

Get it here for $168.48

 

[GoldenTiger]

Can normal drives even read the 32mb version?

 

[GoldenTiger]

<< Get it here for $168.48 >>



Nice find .

 

[GoldenTiger]

I think magneto-optical didn't take off here in the States/Canada because people thought of them as harder to use and more complicated since they're in a cartridge-cd form and also just generalized them as being too expensive, which back then they actually were. They're fairly cheap now, and highly reliable, making it a more reliable option for long, LONG term storage, better than even high quality CDR discs.

 

[Sitinh]

I read some where a few weeks back that Panasonic (I think) is coming out with a drive that can reformat standard 1.44 floppies to 120 (or 140?) MB. Sounds very promising. It is in either PC Mag or PC World, forgot which...very interesting product.

 

[scedward]

<< Cool, I thought the LS-120 died out >>



For the most part it has. There were only two companies making LS-120 diskettes, and one of those
(Imation) has quit making the diskettes as well as selling drives. The remaining company manufacturing diskettes and those making drives for that technology (LS-120/240) are in Japan. MKE has high hopes for those LS-240 drives, but I doubt they get accepted in the US any more than LS-120 did. I would bet that those LS-240 diskettes would be danged hard to come by also.

I worked with that process at Imation from the beginning and was sorry to see it go, but sales just weren't there. It was a far superior product than zip(i'm biased so no flames please), but hey...Iomega beat us to market and never looked back. Ironically enough, Iomega and Imation(3M at the time) were partners on a product called Floptical which was a 21mb floppy a few years prior to LS-120 and Zip. Floptical used the same laser servo technology that LS-120 uses. Anyone remember the 21mb Floptical?


scedward

 

[WingsOverVirginia]

I still have my LS-120 from years ago, and I've got to ask, for that price why would anyone bother? Get a CD-RW, every PC has come with a cdrom drive for years so everyone already has one so sharing files or programs is almost universal. The LS-120 was never a very stable drive, sometimes it won't even read the disks that you wrote on the same drive let alone someone else's drive reading a disk that you wrote on it. If you have a laptop only you can still get an external CD-RW for the same price or less. Even if it does 240MB on a floppy the CD-RW still hold 3X or more information. And the hundreds of CDR's that I have stockpiled especially in the last few months, I don't think I've even spent over $20 on after all the rebates.

I say take all your old floppies, if you still have any, and use them for skeet shooting!

 

[Healey]

<< making it a more reliable option for long, LONG term storage, better than even high quality CDR discs. >>



A recent report predicted that quality CDR's have a useful life of over 100 years. That's plenty long enough for me.

And I've gotten over 600 of 'em, all for free after various rebates. That's plenty cheap enough for me.

 

[littlebig]

In fact, MD is MO. It's 128MB (or similar to this) format, that Sony converted it into audio device. You can find DATA MD in some place like www.minidisco.com. Yeah, they are really popular in Japan, they have tons of pressed music MDs. Have you ever seen 3.5&quot; 640 or 1.3G MDs? They are really small, almost similar to MDs.

You can't really compare CD-RW with MO. MO is storage class device which usually does not require any driver or program to use/write/read it (you may need formatter though). In the case of CD-RW, you have to use special program (ike DirectCD) to use it as disk-like device, or it should be done by CD writing program. Also, life cycle of MO is like 100,000 R/W, which is almost hundreds times higher than CD-RW. CD-RWs are becoming very convenient and fast, but not yet close to daily backup/removable devices. That's why there are still floppies and Zips all around, I guess.

Anyway, all the discusses are OT. That LS-240 drive looks very promising, even though I don't believe using 1.44MB as 32MB is a good idea. I just hope I can live without fr**king unreliable IOMEGA products.

 

[OS]

<< Regular floppies are unreliable as they are now. How can they format those suckers to 32MB? Plus, I wouldn't put anything important on my floppies anyways let alone, use them. >>



Yeah I know, floppies spontaneously go bad for no reason. I wonder if the 32 meg format would make them go bad 32 times faster

 

[ai42]

Howdy... LS-240 drive looks cool but any hot deals on regular internal LS-120 drives? My school has these and they are superfast on regular disks and Zip disks failure rate etc is pissing me off.

 

[ShoNuff]

If these come down in price it would be great. I agree with an earlier post the suggested CDRW's are still a better option at $170 a pop.

 

[Rainguy]

<< Can normal drives even read the 32mb version? >>


No, the LS-240 has smaller specialized heads to do this.



<< If you want really reliable removable media, try MOs (Magneto-Optical). >>


Sure, true but, my point is you aren't going to give away a MO disk to a client or friend and not want it back I want to to give someone 32 MB's of pics on a disk and not have to think about it. And sure, I'm taking into account that the drives drop more in price and that the other party has a drive to read the 32 MB disk. But, who knows how that will pan out.

The floppy always was too small to put anything uselful on it. 32MB's is passable and near free storage with all the disks out there for many situations.

CDRW is also more expensive than floppies, is larger in size, and scratches easier (granted it holds more data, and if more than 32 MB's is required that is the best choice). Also packet writing isn't exactly fast. Finally, burning to a CDR requires a mastering program vs. drag and drop in explorer with a disk.

Anyway, just a few other thoughts. All storage/media has it place and pros and cons.