Floppy Replacements

Flextra

As early as 1988, Brier Technology introduced the Flextra BR 3020, which boasted 21.4 MB (marketing, true size was 21,040 kiB,[32] 25 MiB unformatted). Later the same year it introduced the BR3225, which doubled the capacity. This model could also read standard 3½-inch disks.

Apparently it used 3½-inch standard disks which had servo information embedded on them for use with the Twin Tier Tracking technology.


Floptical

In 1991, Insite Peripherals introduced the "Floptical", which used an infra-red LED to position the heads over marks in the disk surface. The original drive stored 21 MiB, while also reading and writing standard DD and HD floppies. In order to improve data transfer speeds and make the high-capacity drive usefully quick as well, the drives were attached to the system using a SCSI connector instead of the normal floppy controller. This made them appear to the operating system as a hard drive instead of a floppy, meaning that most PC's were unable to boot from them. This again adversely affected adoption rates.

Insite licenced their technology to a number of companies, who introduced compatible devices as well as even larger-capacity formats. Most popular of these, by far, was the LS-120, mentioned below.


Zip drive

In 1994, Iomega introduced the Zip drive. Not true to the 3½-inch form factor, hence not compatible with the standard 1.44 MB floppies, it became the most popular of the "super floppies". It boasted 100 MB, later 250 MB, and then 750 MB of storage and came to market at just the right time, with Zip drives gaining in popularity for several years. It never reached the same market penetration as floppy drives, as only a few new computers were sold with Zip drives. Eventually the falling prices of CD-R and CD-RW media and flash drives, and notorious hardware failures reduced the popularity of the the Zip drive.

A major reason for the failure of the Zip Drives is also attributed to the higher pricing they carried. However hardware vendors such as Hewlett Packard, Dell and Compaq had promoted the same at a very high level. Zip drive media was primarily popular for the excellent compression ratio and drive speed they carried, but was always overshadowed by the price.


LS-120

Announced in 1995, the "SuperDisk" drive, often seen with the brand names Matsushita (Panasonic) and Imation, had an initial capacity of 120 MB (120.375 MiB[33]) using even higher density "LS-120" disks.

It was upgraded ("LS-240") to 240 MB (240.75 MiB). Not only could the drive read and write 1440 kB disks, but the last versions of the drives could write 32 MB onto a normal 1440 kB disk (see note below). Unfortunately, popular opinion held the Super Disk disks to be quite unreliable, though no more so than the Zip drives and SyQuest Technology offerings of the same period. This again, true or otherwise, crippled adoption.


Sony HiFD

Sony introduced their own floptical-like system in 1997 as the 150 MiB Sony HiFD. Although by this time the LS-120 had already garnered some market penetration, industry observers nevertheless confidently predicted the HiFD would be the real floppy-killer and finally replace floppies in all machines.

After only a short time on the market the product was pulled as it was discovered there were a number of performance and reliability problems that made the system essentially unusable. Sony then re-engineered the device for a quick re-release, but then extended the delay well into 1998 instead and increased the capacity to 200 MiB while they were at it. By this point the market was already saturated by the Zip disk so it never gained much market share.


Caleb Technology’s UHD144

Little is known about this device except that it surfaced early in 1998 as the it drive, and provided 144 MB of storage while also being compatible with the standard 1.44 MB floppies. The drive was slower than its competitors but the media was cheaper, running about $8 at introduction and $5 soon after.