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Until this month, when I installed a new Quantum Fireball 8.4 Gb drive, hard drive
space was at a premium. Saving huge files to diskette was time-consuming. Without
a tape backup, I had to use either ARJ, zipsplit, or Info zip. Storage in
my room was another problem, as I had accumulated about a thousand diskettes over
the years.
With their distinctive fan-shaped sliding door, super disks are protected within
a sturdy shell. Zip disks, while being as fast as some hard drives, are not
vacuum sealed like a true hard disk ... possibly one of the reasons that they are
prone to failure, and (consequently) their lower price. I certainly recall
one member of the Toronto User Group griping about defective zip disks. The
LS-120 doesn't appear to be as fast, but considering that you can put the contents
of about a hundred high-density floppy on a single super disk, I am inclined to
believe this is merely a matter of perception. Later in this article, I recommend
a driver that recently appeared on hobbes, and which I find to have improved the
speed of my LS-120, particularly when copying or moving several hundred small files.
I feel that the LS-120 will be the next standard to replace the 3 1/2 inch floppy.
Mind you, there are still folks using old 5 1/4" floppies! Some manufacturers
have already started shipping models with the LS-120 installed. Like zip-drives,
super disk drives are available as IDE, SCSI or parallel-port models. I have found
that they are generic (as far as DOS drivers go). My purchase was the Mitsubishi
internal Model MF3577, and found DOS drivers from other manufacturers that
support it.
Zip-disks need special utilities to repair any data defects. Au contraire, the
super disk can be repaired with DOS utilities, as I have been able to verify using
an old version of Norton Utilities, and even do a "defrag" under PC-DOS
7.0. I found no surface errors with Norton (version 3.0). Naturally, you can drag
and drop files from the WPS to/from the super disk and even run small programs on
it. With larger executables you might notice a speed loss.
My motherboard is a Shuttle
Skywalker HOT-555A, with AWARD BIOS. The CPU is an AMD-686 / 200. I said good-bye
to Intel some five years ago. Previously, I had two 1.44 M floppy drives attached,
and removed the second one. The DOS device drivers supplied were installed easily,
but not correctly. The silly thing insisted on devicehigh={ls-120
device}. Instead, I searched for Super disk (LS-120) drivers and
downloaded LS120.ZIP. However, I still got two drive letters for the super disk
in DOS/Windows 3.1 (B: and E:) with A: for the floppy.
In the CMOS:
Floppy A: 1.44
Mb, enabled
Floppy B: none
Boot sequence:
LS/ZIP, C [You can leave
this as A:, but you won't have the advantage of using boot diskettes with the LS-120
drive]
Floppy redirect
enabled.
With this setup, the Super disk is my bootable diskette drive. On my C: (FAT)
partition, or D: (HPFS) partition, the 1.44M floppy is drive A: and
the LS-120 is drive B: An additional advantage (as regards security): You
can safely leave diskettes in Drive A: knowing that the system cannot be accidentally
booted with an infected floppy.
... and as my math teacher
used to say: "Q.E.D".
P.S. This article
was written for VOICE, at the request of Mark Dodel. I did this using Netscape Composer.
Please send any comments (and please be gentle ... it's my first time <*wink*>
...) to:
eltonw@sympatico.ca. You can also page
me on ICQ: #9984432.
Elton Woo
Montréal (Québec), CANADA - 27th April, 1999.