Imation SuperDisk LS-120

» see imation.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i never saw a superdisk in turkey. the third bay on the pcs in our internet cafes had a zip drive, never the imation drive. you could buy zip carts at vatan and bimeks in the early 2000s for about a hundred and fifty thousand lira a piece. nobody stocked superdisks. that was the whole problem with the ls-120. by the time imation had a product to sell, iomega had three years of distribution lead and every oem already had a drive bay decision made.

the superdisk launched in 1996 as a joint effort between imation, the storage division 3m had just spun out, and matsushita, which sold it through the panasonic brand. honestly the format was better than zip on paper. 120 megabytes per disc instead of 100, and the drive could read regular 1.44 megabyte floppies, which the zip drive could not. an actual upgrade path that did not orphan the user's existing disk library. the price was close to iomega's and the disks cost about the same per megabyte. nothing wrong with the product, the timing was wrong.

compaq and dell took it on as a floppy replacement option for some lines through '98. the ls-240 doubled capacity in 2001 at 240 megabytes per disc, with new firmware that let it write 32 megabytes onto an unmodified regular 1.44 floppy through a software trick. it was a clever last play. by then the cd-r blank had dropped under a lira and usb flash drives were beginning to ship. imation stopped manufacturing in 2003. the panasonic side carried the ls-240 for a little longer in japan and australia before ending it as well.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the postmortem ~

the format war ended before it really started. by 2000 the standard pc had a cd-r drive in the second bay and a usb port on the front. the cd-r blank cost a quarter of a superdisk and held five times the data. the superdisk's only advantage was floppy compatibility, and that mattered less every year because the floppy itself was disappearing. imation kept the line on a maintenance schedule for two years before pulling the plug in 2003. the company itself stayed in the storage tape business for another decade before dissolving in 2017.

~ what got buried with it ~

the superdisk was the better-engineered option in the post-floppy 100mb tier and it lost anyway, the kind of loss the storage market specializes in (close enough). zip won on going first. by 2000 cd-r was cheaper per megabyte and usb flash was on the horizon as the actual replacement. superdisk had no axis to win on by '99 and the market already knew. imation's spinoff status from 3m meant there was no parent company willing to subsidize a long format war. the ls-120 sits in the same drawer as the syquest sparq and the castlewood orb, drives that worked fine and lost on the calendar.

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