Why all external superdisk drives seem to be for Macintosh only?
Posted by darthuna@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 85 comments
All external superdisks drives I've seen on eBay or other places are for Macintosh. But what makes them so Macintoshish? What prevents me to plug these to a Windows or Linux computer and make it work? Inside there's a regular superdisk drive, isn't it? And USB protocol is not exclusive for Macintosh, is it? So why are they'll marketed as "for Macintosh"?
DavidXGA@reddit
I do actually have a beige PC one, so they do exist. Ironically it's plugged into a Mac.
It's because most PC users bought the internal one, but Mac users needed the USB version.
darthuna@reddit (OP)
And what's the difference? Aren't they the same device?
thegreatboto@reddit
Because Apple peeps think their computers and all their accessories need to match.
DavidXGA@reddit
They are different colors.
thatvhstapeguy@reddit
Amusingly, an external SuperDisk drive is just an internal SuperDisk drive with an interface board attached to the back of it.
This is also why a lot of “internal” SuperDisk drives turn up on eBay without bezels.
zed_patrol@reddit
I didn't realize these things were IDE. I have one at work and I plugged it into a debbian box and it didn't mount automatically. I'm guessing that i probably need to mount it manually?
genxretrogaming@reddit
I remember when these first came out. I both an internal one for my PC and replaced my standard 3.5” floppy with it. It was quite amazing at the time to have something so small that could hold so much data.
jaybird_772@reddit
USB was not really a "PC thing" so much at the time they were released. That changed, but by the time it did, the SuperDisk had lost out to the Zip Drive, before the Zip Drive lost out to the USB Drive.
NSE-Imports@reddit
The external Superdrives will work on 32bit Windows just fine, on x64 versions that proprietary IDE to USB brick is not supported. However, if you pop the case off and use a modern-ish IDE to USB 2.0 adapter it will work on most versions on Windows until late Win 10 versions (from memory).
starcube@reddit
3rd Gen USB drives that just have a USB port and no brick work just fine under every modern version of Windows.
cyri-96@reddit
Yep recently found one of these in my electronics pile, plugged it into my current PC, still works perfectly.
NSE-Imports@reddit
Some USB 3.0 adapters behave weirdly with non-HD devices (both powered and non powered), I have a few which will not support my Blu-ray or older optical drives when plugged into a USB 3.0 port, but work fine if plugged in USB 2.0 ports. Some flatly refuse to understand anything non HD based. For these Superdrives I found that my older USB 2.0 adapters were better suited.
From an OS perspective at some point in the Win 10 life cycle they removed Superdrive support, while I could see the drive hooked through a more modern USB adapter, Windows would not longer recognize it. Yet the same setup would work 'out the box' on very early Win 10 or previous versions.
starcube@reddit
You misunderstood.
I meant third-generation external LS-120 disk drives with the USB interface built into the drive.
The ones that use the external brick cables for LPT and USB are second generation.
And then the really boxy beige metal ones with two LPT ports directly on the back are first generation.
NSE-Imports@reddit
Ah did not know they made later ones, I had one of the iMac styles pictured and then an internal IDE model. Neither worked past early to mid Win 10 builds for me no matter what combination of IDE to USB or IDE to SATA adapters I lashed together.
starcube@reddit
Fun fact - the actual drives are all the same inside, they're IDE. It's the interface attached to them that converts to either LPT or USB externally.
NSE-Imports@reddit
I know, this is why I said in my first reply that I popped the case open to use a more modern USB 2.0 adapter in place of theirs. Worked a treat until Windows removed support for them.
starcube@reddit
That's why your best bet is the third-generation drive.
zidane2k1@reddit
Iirc, it will work just fine under Windows and Linux.
The reason so many of these were marketed as “for Macintosh” was, when Apple introduced the first iMac, they did not include many legacy components, among them the floppy disk drive. Manufacturers (Imation, most notably) styled these drives like the iMac and marketed them as “for Macintosh” likely to make it obvious, particularly for beginners, that this accessory would work with the fancy new computer they just bought. (Fun fact: For the Imation drive pictured, the drive is actually a standard ATAPI drive inside a housing, and the chunk at the end of the USB cable is a USB to ATA converter.)
Meanwhile, PCs still commonly had floppy drives for nearly a decade after. And, most PC users who wanted larger removable disks were likely already using ZIP disks, which also worked on Macintosh with the same external ZIP drives, making these less necessary for PCs. LS-120 drives marketed for PC were most commonly internal, since additional drives could be installed (relatively) easily inside a PC; there wasn’t much demand or need for a more expensive external model.
Anyway, it turned out LS-120 didn’t catch on as much as the manufacturers hoped. The LS-120 media was kind of expensive, which may have limited adoption. Most of the time the drive was simply used as a faster floppy drive with standard disks.
cyri-96@reddit
In that regard, I recently found a similar old external Disk drive in my pile of electronics and just plugged it into my PC i built last year (B650 mainboard with 7800X3D, running Windows 11), it perfectly accepted the external drive, so yeah this stuff just works, and is still supported even by current Hardware.
Max-P@reddit
Availability of drivers also wasn't a given for Macs at the time. There was largely the PC world and the Mac world. If you had a Mac, you would be looking for that "for Macintosh" marks before you buy. Things were starting to standardize, but we weren't quite at the "put in a SCSI PCI card and it just works" era.
PCs preferred IDE, Macs preferred SCSI, later on PCs had USB and Macs had FireWire. Not that you couldn't buy hardware to add support for those on either machine, but if you wanted your accessories to work and have the optimal performance, you'd generally follow the "for PC" and "for Macintosh" labels to be sure you had a tested supported configuration.
Moot point today, as both Windows and Linux have drivers for all of that stuff well figured out and mature.
zidane2k1@reddit
That’s a good point you make about the drivers. I forgot that prior to about the mid-2000s, Macintosh drivers weren’t readily available for many accessories, and you had to buy a “for Macintosh” accessory to ensure it came with Macintosh drivers.
TheMage18@reddit
And/or have reliable internet connectivity for OS 9 to connect to Apple and download the necessary drivers for the early stuff.
sidusnare@reddit
My LS-240 isn't Mac Candy colored, one was beige the other black.
eggnorman@reddit
By the time LS-240 was around, no one in the western market cared so I doubt it made sense to Candy-code it then.
sidusnare@reddit
Agreed, but it's still one of my favorite pieces
eggnorman@reddit
Oh, no doubt. I’ve never actually seen an LS-240 in the wild. The tech behind these drives was bounds ahead - too bad it never caught on here.
questron64@reddit
I don't think I've ever seen an external superdisk. I used to use internal superdisks and they kicked ass.
darthuna@reddit (OP)
Btw, any trick to manually remove a disk from inside a stubborn (malfunctioning/with no power) o herbal superdisk drive?
questron64@reddit
Without power, no. They have soft eject and if there is a trick to do it with no power or a dead drive then I don't remember.
darthuna@reddit (OP)
And with power but the drive doesn't want to eject? Is there anything that can be done?
benryves@reddit
You can force eject the disk via the hole in the eject button.
darthuna@reddit (OP)
I figured that, but it doesn't do anything.
benryves@reddit
It sounds like you'll need to take the drive apart to repair it, then, if there's a mechanical fault.
questron64@reddit
If you can't find an answer here then ask on Vogons. Someone there will be a superdisk user for 25+ years, I'm sure.
Consistent_Cat7541@reddit
Nothing. The drives can be used with Macs or PCs. At the time, companies were marketing these devices principally to iMac G3 owners because the machines did not have floppy drives. PCs of the era did, and generally, PC owners who wanted a SuperDisk drive (or a Zip drive) would install an internal drive into an open bay in their towers (most computers at the time had at least one open 5.25" drive bays, the other being used for a CDROM drive).
Please note that the only use for these drives now is to retrieve the data off old discs to move to another media.
I have one lying around that I have not used for decades.
Raguleader@reddit
Since it was backwards compatible it'd be easy enough to just swap out the 3.5" floppy drive for the LS120.
Consistent_Cat7541@reddit
I don't think LS120 drives used the internal floppy connectors on PCs. I think the other comments are correct that it was an IDE device (just a very slow one).
Raguleader@reddit
Either way, it was backwards compatible with 3.5" floppies and could fit in the same drive bay. You'd just connect it to a different cable inside the case.
bluereptile@reddit
However it couldn’t be booted from as a Floppy drive
Jorpho@reddit
Ironically, these drives still aren't capable of reading Macintosh 800k GCR floppies, much like any PC floppy drive, making the Macintosh branding particularly inappropriate.
But reportedly, they are particularly fast drives, as floppy drives go. https://youtu.be/wWwp3vVtElw?t=1424
Nickmorgan19457@reddit
Everything looked like that for a little while after the iMac came out.
LostDefinition4810@reddit
I don’t know, but I had one and thought it made me the bee’s knees.
bigrobcx@reddit
Most drives were superior to the Zip drive. I bought one while I was at uni to make life easier since every computer in the uni labs had a Zip drive and they were terrible. The drives would for no discernible reason all of a sudden stop reading disks and just click. Your data was history and totally unrecoverable. If click death didn’t get you, the drive read head Would end up out slightly out of calibration and after the data was written, no other drive would be able to read it back other than the one that wrote the disk. I ended up having to email my files to myself as a backup in case the Zip disk failed. Utter garbage.
PriestWithTourettes@reddit
The story was similar to the Ford Pinto. The Pinto would explode in a rear impact because some bean counter decided a barrier preventing this was going to cost too much (<$20 USD per car). In the case of Iomega it was much the same: There was a part that would dampen the impact of the head when it hit the limits of the track it was mounted on. Some bean counter decided that wasn’t necessary and it would save a bit of money per drive. Except it was needed and eventually repeated impacts threw the head out of alignment resulting in the click of death. It killed the reputation and eventually Iomega itself.
DeviantDav@reddit
While this is a true story, it still pisses me off NBC got away with faking that explosion footage because THEY COULD NOT GET A PINTO TO EXPLODE.
caddymac@reddit
Are you sure you’re not thinking of the Squarebody GM trucks?
SimiShittyProgrammer@reddit
Every fucking car back then had drop in rear fuel tanks too.
My Mustang did as well, lol.
classicvincent@reddit
The first computer my parents bought was an HP Pavilion in 1999, I wanted an IMac but they were used to using Windows at work. That PC had a floppy drive and an internal Zip drive that got used a couple times, but among PC users Zip drives were pretty rare, but not nearly as rare as Superdisks.
good_at_pies@reddit
ah yeah I managed Mac & PC student labs late '90s - mid 2000's (tertiary) & yeah we did some naive things sometimes with peripheral devices but the zip drives were all internals in desktop Mac G3/G4s - they performed fairly well in that situation.
People don't believe me but in that job, 'print desk' monkey before that and personal use with audio samplers - I only had one bad Zip disk happen. Magic zip drive aura?
The main problem ended up (in sound studio land anyway) being that file sizes very quickly started to fill up the media too quickly.
AppropriateCap8891@reddit
And I used them for about a decade (internal and external) and never once had the "click of death".
AppropriateCap8891@reddit
It arrived just in time, but that time was amazingly short.
One has to look at the era when the Zip and LS-120 came out in the mid-1990s. Most system hard drives had yet to crack 500 MB, and home and small business networks were rare. And the only real competition other than QIC-80 tapes was CDRW. And blank CDs were still in the range of $20 or more a disk.
Right as they came out, they were an excellent choice. But not for long, as Win95 had built in peer to peer networking capability and the price of blank CDs quickly fell to less than a dollar. So by 2000, a format that allowed you to transfer 100 mb was simply not that big a deal. Especially when flash memory started to plunge in price, and you could get a gigabyte on a USB stick for $100 or less.
I used both of them, as well as some others like the JAZ. But like the QIC tapes, the rapid expansion of both hard drive size as well as program and data sizes only gave it a small window of real use. Just like the Bernoulli, SyQuest, and all the other file storage formats that came before them.
bjspartan0@reddit
I have an m3 model, and there is software to make it work with Windows. In fact, the m3 model works with Windows 10. The power adapter that came with it was dead.
In side the casing should have an ide interface connected to a usb controller board. In the m3 models, the usb connector board easily comes loose despite being screwed in. So yeah, you probably just need a new power cord or to just take the case off and push the connector back in, though screwing it back in the enclosure causes it to come loose again in my experience.
revdon@reddit
They’re advertised as Mac-only because most PCs didn’t have USB yet; though it probably worked if your PC had it. There was an internal superdisk that was PC only. That ticked me off because I would’ve put internals in all my Mac lab desktops.
ZIP won b/c it was quick, cheap, and ubiquitous; the perfect example of “good enough beats perfect”.
1leggeddog@reddit
Iirc, i think Macintosh machines had more base external scsi ports making for faster data transfer
JeremyLC@reddit
I have exactly that drive. It works fine on my PC... It even works with my Android phone.
CommentOriginal@reddit
I remember PC users losing their mind that the iMac didn’t have a floppy drive. I remember thinking what were you even using it for at that point. You could fill it pretty quickly for normal office use and if you did anything multiple media wise it was a no go.
I used Zip disks primarily because Mac had those and most of the other people I worked with on the PC side got a Zip drive. We had a couple of these drives in base someone came in with a floppy or super disk. At the time I had a Beige G3 with no USB so never used it, the guys with the newer Blue and White G3s would because they had USB.
Memories lol
Misterdrez@reddit
the retarded boss of our department at a college made all dells we bought come with these MANDATORY.
he was told he had to destroy the free ls120 disks they came with and tell people to buy blanks at the bookstore.
Now these drives break a LOT cause "students" dont give a SHIT and pull the disk out thus destroying the RW head. (this was before affordable usb sticks).
So 4 years later when all were upgraded they put a reg floppy in and left it at that.
yeah this was like 20 years ago, and they were IDE internal drives. you can only imagine some of the DUMB SHIT they had us order that either didnt work right or they couldn't understand how to use it, or the software company didnt know they had a /s switch.
but the good ole LS120s were fine if you treated them right
WaterAny5543@reddit
I also have one of these. It is in a drawer
6502zx81@reddit
My guess: at that time PCs came with floppy drives installed, Macs didn't have them anymore. No PC user would have bought a superdisk.
ceojp@reddit
A superdisk drive isn't a normal 1.44MB floppy drive, it's a 120MB floppy drive. Of course PC users would have had a use for these. We bought an internal ls120 drive for our PC back then.
giantsparklerobot@reddit
The LS-120 drives were backwards compatible with standard DD and HD 3.5" floppies. The internal LS-120 drives in a PC could actually fully replace a floppy drive if you wanted (and your BIOS supported it). An advantage of the LS-120 over a regular floppy drives is they were much higher quality than the average floppy drives of the day which were highly commoditized at the time. You'd be able to read floppies on an LS-120 that couldn't be read properly in a regular drive. Not always obviously but if a disk had problems it was worth trying in an LS-120 if you had one.
ceojp@reddit
Yeah, that's what I loved about the ls-120 drives - it worked with regular floppies also.
6502zx81@reddit
Also, eject by software.
squirrel8296@reddit
That was generally only on Apple's drives. Any third party drive will usually have a button to eject.
synapse57@reddit
Everyone else used Zip100 drives. Apple yanked the floppy drive from the iMac.. so.. this was more popular for that.
Pleasant_Expert_1990@reddit
Because Apple makes difficult to work on Macs internally on purpose
Cameront9@reddit
Certainly not in the era this was released. The entire G3 iMac board comes out with a couple of screws. Power Mac’s were insanely easy to open and work on.
gcc-O2@reddit
Heh
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040409-00/?p=39873
darthuna@reddit (OP)
This perfectly answers my question.
eulynn34@reddit
I have a SuperDisk drive. The drive itself doesn't care what computer you plug it into and shows as a floppy drive in MacOS or Windows. The two disks I have were originally Mac formatted, but I could easily reformat for whatever.
darthuna@reddit (OP)
This answers my question. People are replying that Macs didn't have space for internal drives while PCs did, but this is not what I asked.
sidusnare@reddit
It's probably a side effect that in the teardrop iMac age, USB was the new hotness and there was reduced internal expansion in all their product line.
PrestigiousTale9660@reddit
Oh man
This brings me back
AppropriateCap8891@reddit
This is probably the case with externals, as the iMac of the era did not have internal drive bays to mount them into. The fact this is colored to match the "Blueberry" iMac shows that is what this version was intended for.
I dealt with a large number of LS-120 drives for the PC in that era, and for those it was quite a bit different. Those were all internal models, and connected via the IDE port on the motherboard.
This is likely due to you searching for external models, and not internal models.
Lonewulf32@reddit
Probably because, like most apple products, they never have enough storage space.
good_at_pies@reddit
in student computer lab land we were scrambling for floppy drives when the original iMacs came out. The Superdisks were one alternative though my job we just added a USB floppy to ea. machine instead.
compu85@reddit
I think because they were used by a lot of people with iMacs, who just wanted a floppy. FWIW, even though these have an ide drive inside they don't work on windows.
squirrel8296@reddit
Couple reasons:
Those 2 combined to make it so most of the PC ones went to the recyclers along with the PC they were used with while the Apple ones frequently stayed around, usually in a closet somewhere until someone rediscovered it years later and decided to sell it on eBay.
That being said, the USB-based Mac ones will work on a PC with a USB port as long as you have the PC driver for it. There will also be Mac ones that are based on SCSI, and those generally will not work on a PC unless you have the exact same SCSI port on your PC (usually a card) and a compatible driver. Linux is anyone's guess. I'd assume it probably would work there as well, but Linux was still pretty new when SuperDisk was around.
rosmaniac@reddit
There was a whole era of Gateway 2000 machines that came from the factory with internal LS-120 drives. I have half a dozen of the drives scavenged from Gateway 2000 machines.
Carlos_Spicy_Weiner6@reddit
Super drives or ls120 drives tended to be quite a bit more expensive than normal diskette drives. If I remember right it was because of the optical part of it or something. Beingore expensive they were mainly targeted at the apple crowd who generally didn't mind paying more. With capacities increasing on zip drives, these drives were not able to keep up and slowly faded from existence. Finding working drives now a days is getting harder and harder due to how they read and write to the disks.
Niphoria@reddit
Also you can literally just take the drive out and take any IDE to XXX adapter to make it work lol
StrictFinance2177@reddit
A windows user that needed such a solution likely used a Zip drive instead at the time.
But there's nothing that stops you from using it outside an old Mac.
fbissonnette@reddit
Because most PCs at that time still had a floppy disk drive but the candy iMac didn’t
ceojp@reddit
This is not a standard 1.44MB floppy drive, it's an ls120 drive.
OozingHyenaPussy@reddit
ever use an iphone? apple products run out of store wothin 6mo
s/ but really too