20-50 KB/sec? Wow. Put into perspective, that's 3-7x faster than a 56k modem. 😀

bjt wrote:

Would like to try an LS-240, but I've only seen laptop versions. […]
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Would like to try an LS-240, but I've only seen laptop versions.

There's also this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_HiFD
Someone in the US buy this and try it out!
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Genuine-28L1600-28L … 0-/391413511230

Interesting it looks like it has both an IDE and a Floppy interface? Does it need both to function or does it work with either one? I am also not clear on if it will still read standard floppys.

I Found an active auction for an LS240 but it's for a laptop?....AND it's like 160 bucks.....No bueno...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/LKM-FH34-5-FLOPPY-DIS … 4kAAOSwGOxXATDa

torindkflt wrote:

I've never encountered one in the wild, but there used to be "Floptical" drives that connected via SCSI and used special 21MB disks that were otherwise identical in physical format to standard floppies, in fact the drive could also read/write standard floppies. I can't seem to find any numbers regarding performance when using a standard floppy disk, but according to Wikipedia the special 21MB floptical disks could do 1.6mbit/sec. Since it used SCSI, I wouldn't doubt that it had some sort of performance advantage on the standard floppy side.

It probably doesn't count since IIRC there was no way to connect it to your computer and use it as an external floppy drive, but as I recall the floppy drives in Sony Mavica cameras were rated at "2x" speed.

Those 21MB disks I never encountered in the wild, but I do recall one other Vogons member having such a drive. Those 21MB disks had some kind of special pre-formatted disks, one couldn't just go format them.

Those drives are also very old, I'm not sure these would be significantly faster than, say, LS-120.

Welst doing other things somehow my USB floppy died. looked at all the floppys I had tried to write/read with them while trying to get it to work and found that it was making marks in the disk surface itself. AWESOME.

I wonder if anyone has a working Bernoulli drive around here...

I found this user guide for the eBay HiFD drive linked above:
http://ps-2.kev009.com/pccbbs/options/d3q2jmst.pdf

The install instructions indicate that the drive is connected to both the floppy controller and the IDE controller, and can act in place of drive A:.
What's not clear is whether HD and DD disks can be accessed via ATAPI or only HiFD disks.
If HD and DD disks can only be accessed via the floppy controller it won't be any faster.
And what the heck does the drive do when it receives commands from the floppy controller and IDE at the same time?!
I would get one to try out but don't fancy spending £50 on a hunch.

It was very common to format regular disks with optimized interleave (using e.g. VGACopy).
So for the benches shown here, which type of formatting was used?
Has anyone benched disks that were formatted with the DOS tool and compared them to disks with optimized interleave?

I guess I could try that. I used Win98 exclusively, as this was what the OP specified as the context. A wider study could be interesting.

elianda wrote:

It was very common to format regular disks with optimized interleave (using e.g. VGACopy).
So for the benches shown here, which type of formatting was used?
Has anyone benched disks that were formatted with the DOS tool and compared them to disks with optimized interleave?

Many eons ago, I was vigorously experimenting with a program which iirc called this "sector sliding"?
I tried different settings and in some cases it was indeed a bit faster, but not by much.

In the end I came to the conclusion that it would only be really practical when formatting floppies with sector sliding when I wanted to format the disk anyway and it was likely the disk was still without errors. Otherwise I found it just a waste of time, mostly because the formatting of all those disks actually took more time than I got back by using these disks.

I think I used .bat files so I could have a good workflow.

I also experimented with weird formats, kinda similar to how DMF is different. Was very interesting.

Tetrium wrote:

In the end I came to the conclusion that it would only be really practical when formatting floppies with sector sliding when I wanted to format the disk anyway and it was likely the disk was still without errors. Otherwise I found it just a waste of time, mostly because the formatting of all those disks actually took more time than I got back by using these disks.

Well, when I bought new disks they had to be formatted anyway.

I found an auction for a 4x Sony USB floppy drive on yahoo, the model is
http://www.sony.jp/cat/products/MFD-40UC/
Sony's website also shows a 2x model...

lolo799 wrote:

I found an auction for a 4x Sony USB floppy drive on yahoo, the model is
http://www.sony.jp/cat/products/MFD-40UC/
Sony's website also shows a 2x model...

Would be interested to see how they perform considering the other USB drives' terrible performance.

According to Sony:

I posted the link to the auction in the ebay thread, if anyone wants it.

Is yahoo auctions only in asia? I never heard of it until joining this forum.

Rhuwyn wrote:

Is yahoo auctions only in asia? I never heard of it until joining this forum.

Yes, but there's ways to buy from it if you simply must acquire something off of it. You'll pay through the nose but it's possible.

Rhuwyn wrote:

So there are standard 1.44 MB floppy drives connected to a floppy Controller. Then we have USB Floppy drives. Then we have Gote […]
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So there are standard 1.44 MB floppy drives connected to a floppy Controller.
Then we have USB Floppy drives.
Then we have Gotek Floppy drive emulators.
There are also LS-120 drives which connect via IDE but can read standard floppy disks in addition to the 120MB disks.

Has anyone gone and bench-marked these options to see what the read/write performance is in comparison to each other? I am about to take the plunge on getting some old older systems up and running which ultimately will require a lot of swapping floppys. I actually have a USB Floppy disk and just found an IDE LS-120 in cobwebs. Was just curious if anyone had done the legwork on this before I go doing a comparison myself.

What floppies are you or were you planning to be swapping a lot of? 5 1/4" and 3 1/2"? I got some tricks that may help if I knew what you were trying to do. You could do dual internal 1.44MB A: and B: and then add 2 more USB 1.44MB but you will have to assign them another drive letter. Copying straight unprotected files off these will be easy as long as you open a window for each drive and do a copy and paste it to another folder. Do this for each one as soon as the first one starts copying and you should have all 4 floppy drives copying simultaneously to say your hard drive. More could be added if you had more USB ports but it should work. This will beat any single floppy copy device strategy. I probably have around 5,000 to 10,000 floppies over the years stored.

As for the LS-120s I grabbed one when full price then later I grabbed the last few of them when they went on sale and got discontinued. Strange to hear there even existed a LS-240. I was praising the LS-120 as a possible alternative to the 1.44MB or 2.88MB finally then a few months later they were dead. This was during the time Iomega and those damn zip drives were selling like hotcakes. Then CD burners were starting to catch on and I recall seeing the so called read speeds constantly rising 24x 32x 48x 50x as if it were some arms race. Each few weeks it would climb up faster and faster. I always joked that if you ejected your disc out too soon it would slit your throat. Then CD-R media though expensive still then seemed like a better solution than those Zip drives. But the LS-120 only had one true feature that I valued being backward compatible with 1.44MB and 720KB floppies with no problems. I'm not sure how reliable formatting them would be as I usually still stuck with the legacy floppy drives for that just in case but I did format one of these to make it bootable. The company making these needed to have jumped to LS-1200 or LS-600 to really compete and survive then instead of starting at 120MB. 120MB vs 650MB and the cost of the LS-120 disks themselves it was an unfair battle and they could have added 2.88MB support as well for those who had them. But overall the read speeds weren't too bad compared to a regular internal floppy disk drive. Maybe 2-3 as fast in some cases. The write speeds I can remember being rather sluggish but once it was done you were good to go. It was like having an oversized floppy disk.

Those Go-teks I wouldn't classify as a real floppy disk drives since you can't use it as one. It's more of a flash drive with the option to swap the images. I would rather use a USB floppy instead. The only thing that bothered me about the LS-120 when I first took it out was it didn't connect to the standard floppy drive controller. It was IDE and I didn't want to waste one of my IDE ports. Back then there was a max of 4 hard disk drives if you didn't hook up a CDrom on one of them. Adding this device you will be left with just two hard drives max. Mine ended up being a glorified storage for all my old DOS games on one disk but with CDs being more reliable it was a no win situation. That was a convenience only for that system. If you were on the go the disk would be useless unless the person also had the same drive to read it.

Many years before that there was some form of optical drive before CDrom technology. I think it was around 100MB capacity and the drive was close to a $1,000 and the media was around $150. I couldn't see myself investing in that but that was a lot of space for alternative storage than tape drives.

😳

Paragraph breaks (ie. the ENTER key) are your friend, bro. 😉

Stiletto wrote:

Paragraph breaks (ie. the ENTER key) are your friend, bro. 😉

One moderator hates blank lines another loves them. One dislikes consecutive posts and another is okay with them. You can't win them all.

^-^ (Blanky) Go figure! 😊