The LS-120 drive: useful drive or technological curiousity?

I just got a 27 with an LS-120 superdisk. My first impression was "oh well, this is useless" but after a while i figured what the heck, maybe i'll stick it in my 28 and see what happens. well XP knows its there but didn't have a driver for it. and oddly enough, none of the panasonic driver sites seem to have anything for it either?!

so do you guys think this is a total waste of time or is it worthwhile to try to make it do something? about all i'm hoping to get out of it is faster data transfer from ordinary floppy disks!

 

I think it is a great idea... (As usual!) If you can get it to work... Which I'm sure you can. I'll bet you can still find drivers for it. Do you have a good supply of diskettes?

Also... Did you just swap out the old floppy for this? Was it an easy fit or did it require modification?

EDIT - DUH! You said you got it with a 27? I didn't know trhey offered it as an option. What does it hold? 100MB?

 

as always a great idea was release to late and cd/dvd drives made them obsolete before they got the foot off the ground. I bought one of these drives new when they where first release used it for a year or two got sick of paying AU$30 each for discs when I could get a cd-burner and pay a $1 a cd..

 

Ok it works (although I get a yellow ! in device manager for the floppy disk controller) but it is of questionable benefit. I compared the speed against a regular floppy by booting from a W98 recovery disk, and the regular floppy took 49 seconds while the LS120 took 52. Even if I'm to blame for gross timing inaccuracy, at best it is a dead heat. And, it seems that the LS120 drive isn't recognised from the parallel port cable like the regular floppy is.

So I guess the LS120 drive won't be part of the geek-bling I carry around with me

 

I just about spit coffee through my nose....

"Geek-Bling".... ROFLMAO.....

 

haha.. like that huh? i was taking a class at GM and the instructor asked if we had USB thumb drives.. one guy said "sure, i got the geek bling"!

 

HI,
What is a LS-120 drive?

Sparky

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk

It is the highest evolution of the floppy disk. Unfortunately, it more or less has gone the way of the BetaMax tape format

 

HI,
Thanks gravitar. Good answer. I have never seen or used one. They must not have become very common. Bad timing I guess.

Sparky

 

One thing about the LS120's is that they are IDE just like a CD-ROM drive or hard drive. They may have hack potential as second hard drives in the media bay. Just rip out the guts of the ls120 drive and connect a hard drive. You may have to get some adaptors to make the connection but wouldn't it be great to have another 120GB in the media pocket?

 

Needless to say I opened mine as soon as I got it

it appears in the BIOS as an ATAPI device, but the internal connector is small like for the floppy drive. I don't think you'd be any better off trying to modify an LS120 drive for hard drive use than you would be with a regular old floppy drive.

 

I have a few LS120 drives for the CF-72 and taking it apart I noticed that the drive has the same connector as the CD-ROM drives I think it is called a JA-50. I have seen adapters that convert the JA-50 to 44 pin IDE which would make this a viable hack to convert it to a second hard drive. Maybe the CF-27 drives are set up different as I only have the CF-72 drives.

 

hmm.. i'll take another look at it. i was thinking about the HD interface but the CDROM drive connectors are pretty small, too. maybe i need to take this sucker apart and see what i've got!

 

I LIKE that idea....!!!!

 

Do you have the jumper set to "Master"?

 

Any update on this?