Gotek and HxC drive emulators have the same limitations as standard floppy drives. They must "talk" to a floppy disk controller that can only talk at 250 and 500 kbits/sec, so they have no improvements to the standard read speeds. HINT: with some clever sector reordering, standard floppies can improve sequential readings (on track changes), but it won't be a major improvement.

USB and LS-120 speeds are not limited by bus speed, but they would need to improve the rotation speed of the floppy to read faster. If they stick to standard speeds, they won't read data faster.

Note that any alternative to standard floppies can do some caching to improve speeds. That would save some time moving the heads and waiting to reach the sectors, but I don't know it they do so (at least HxC does not).

Maybe someone else has done this but if they don't reply in the next day I could easily run some tests and publish some results. I don't have a Go-Tek unfortunately but I do have an IDE and parallel LS-120 drive and USB floppy drives. The only major drawback is that native floppy is the only option for pre-Win98 systems without pissing about with drivers.

Don't have numbers but I can say subjectively that the Gotek is the same speed as a "real" floppy drive and the ATAPI LS-120 is at least 3-4x faster with DD and HD disks, maybe more.

I have a pata las-120. I'll do son tests and share them for you.

brassicGamer wrote:

Maybe someone else has done this but if they don't reply in the next day I could easily run some tests and publish some results. I don't have a Go-Tek unfortunately but I do have an IDE and parallel LS-120 drive and USB floppy drives. The only major drawback is that native floppy is the only option for pre-Win98 systems without pissing about with drivers.

Yes your correct on pre98 for sure. Basically I am just asking because I'm going to probably doing a lot of floppy swapping here with a couple projects I am thinking about and if the LS-120 does indeed have faster write speeds I am just hoping to use it to cut time on the time it takes to write the floppy images.

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.

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.

That sounds like the exact same thing just a diffrent format. LS-120 are that and they come in both IDE, SCSI, and external USB varieties. They can read both 1.44MB traditional floppys and 120MB SuperDisks. Ultimately it seems like this is my best shot at having faster floppy disk read/write speeds.

Preliminary results are not what you might expect. Best read speed is from the LS-120 but it's slow as hell writing an image. This is via IDE at the moment so I will try it out with an external USB interface too, and on different hardware architectures / operating systems. I've tried two different models of traditional floppy drive and 3 different USB models - results vary widely! Will try to finish tonight but will make it an ongoing investigation to find the fastest way to read / write floppy media.

I did a few quick tests, all conducted in Win98 using WinImage 7.
The LS-120 drives are definitely better at reading than writing HD and DD disks. In fact, I couldn't get the Mitsubishi drive to write a DD disk at all.
The Gen2 LS-120 drive is quite a lot quicker than the Gen1, so that's the one you want.
There are also (rare) LS-240 drives out there, I wonder if those are quicker.

X-axis = time in seconds, smaller is better

wait, there are gen1 and 2 ls-120 drives? how exactly do you tell them apart?

Looks like the first gen LS-120 is even slower at writes then the ordinary floppy you are comparing it to. That is pretty crazy considering it's an IDE device. I wonder why that is. Can you tell me how you ran the test? I'd like to do the same thing and compare a USB floppy to it as well. I've only got a single LS-120 though and I have no idea if it is first or second generation.

Zup wrote:

HINT: with some clever sector reordering, standard floppies can improve sequential readings (on track changes), but it won't be a major improvement.

Supposedly, in the days of drum memory, skilled programmers used to write things in such a way that they would always be written and accessed as fast as possible by painstakingly determining the position of the drum which the data would be written to in respect to the next expected read (or the other way around, depending on what was going on).

The same logic applies to any mechanical medium and the easiest way to see it for the average Joe is with the differences in FAT and NTFS, try comparing the performance - especially sequentially and across many files. Because NTFS essentially makes a mess you take a noticeable hit. This is most noticeable with access times and can even cause problems, such as dropped frames in video recordings, if certain conditions are met.

I was going to ask the same thing about the revisions.

Full results are below but headlines are:

- The LS-120 drives are awesome at reading but crap at writing. I should say that while this is true when it comes to speed, the success rate I have had reading disks that no other drive will read is astounding so it's worth having at least one purely for this purpose. I also believe that the slower write times are due to the LS-120 being 'more careful' at writing to the disk, thereby making it slower. I'd like to find out what revision my drives are though, and I'd like to see further results from other drives.
- USB drives are around 20% slower at writing than native floppy drives, and only marginally better at reading.
- Mitsumi USB drives are shit.
- In most cases there is no significant variance between operations performed on a PII running W98 and a PCI Express Celeron D system running W2K3 Server. I did observe a 25% improvement in reading from USB devices, however.

Notes:

- Margin for error is +/- 1Kb/s
- Each test was performed with the same high density floppy disk in each case.
- Imaging operations were performed with Disk 1 from the Windows for Workgroups installer set, which is 1.40 MB in size (1,474,560 bytes).
- File transfer operations were performed using Windows Explorer with the contents of this image (19 files).
- Operations were timed using a stopwatch and logged in seconds. I then divided the size of the disk by this to get KB/s.
- Nearly all drives were tested on a Windows 98 system: a Pentium II @ 550MHz on Intel BX chipset with WinImage 6.1. The only drive not tested on this system was the second LS-120 drive, which is installed in the server mentioned below.
- After seeing so much variance in the USB drive results (one was nearly twice as slow as the others), I tested these again on a Windows 2003 Server: a Celeron D @ 2.66GHz on Intel 945GC chipset. I found a minor improvement in most cases using the same version of WinImage.
- I performed further tests with a Windows 8 system: a Core i5 @ 1.7GHz on Intel HM77 Express chipset and WinImage 9.0 (64-bit). I found no variance from the 2K3 system results.
- A final observation is something I've never observed before: native and USB floppy drives are cached so that if they are read or written to once, subsequent transactions are almost instantaneous. It's the first time I've come across this and I don't know if it's down to flash memory in the drive itself or an operating system feature. Ejecting a disk clears the cache.

Key:
Native1 is NEC model FD1231H
Native2 is Sony model MPF920
LS120A is Mitsubishi model MF357G-2111MAL
LS120A is going to be something like the above but I can't get to the label right now
USB1 is a drive that came with a Sony Vaio, identifying as 'Y-E Data'
USB2 is a generic Mitsumi model identifying as 'Mitsumi USB FDD 016M'
USB3 is a generic drive identifying as 'Y-E Data'

Further data to be added later:
- LS-120 via IDE to USB interface
- LS-120 via IDE to parallel interface

luckybob wrote:

wait, there are gen1 and 2 ls-120 drives? how exactly do you tell them apart?

I believe all Mitsubishi drives are gen1, all Matsushita/Panasonic are gen2. For IDE you can tell by inspection or device identifier. Not sure who makes the "Imation" brand external USB drives. My Mitsubishi is noticeably louder than the Matsushita in operation.

damn, mine is a gen1 then. I do have an external one but its buried somewhere.

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

Rhuwyn wrote:

Looks like the first gen LS-120 is even slower at writes then the ordinary floppy you are comparing it to. That is pretty crazy considering it's an IDE device. I wonder why that is. Can you tell me how you ran the test?

Using WinImage 7, just read the floppy and write it back with and without verify turned on. The floppy can be blank.

bjt wrote:

Rhuwyn wrote:

Looks like the first gen LS-120 is even slower at writes then the ordinary floppy you are comparing it to. That is pretty crazy considering it's an IDE device. I wonder why that is. Can you tell me how you ran the test?

Using WinImage 7, just read the floppy and write it back with and without verify turned on. The floppy can be blank.

My results show that verification doesn't affect the speed of ATA bus devices but does negatively affect USB devices.

bjt wrote:

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

Re: Floppy disk archaeology tips