Serial DVD burner

[sechs]

Are LS-120 drives a major inprovement over a floppy?

There's a guy on eBay with a stack of used drives (with SCSI adapters, no less) for what appears to be a reasonable price. Might take the plunge.

 

[blakerwry]

i've used 2 different LS120 drives and have not noticed them being any faster than a regular floppy with regular floppie disks. Infact, they have both been reletively loud and obnoxious compared to most of the floppy drives I've used.

In my last two computers i've used some of the quieter floppy drives that I've come across (the current one being from a packard bell 386 and is truley quiet)

 

[Computer Generated Baby]

Are LS-120 drives a major inprovement over a floppy?

Only if you want to be able to put a 120 MB floppy into your top shirt pocket.

There's a guy on eBay with a stack of used drives (with SCSI adapters, no less) for what appears to be a reasonable price. Might take the plunge.

Ewww... sounds kinda yicky. I wouldn't buy a used LS-120 necessarily.

I would imagine there are some brand new old-stock LS-120 drives available somewhere for cheap. The Superdisk units that were marketed to the iMac crowd for years were external LS-120 drives in a translucent USB 1.1 case.

i've used 2 different LS120 drives and have not noticed them being any faster than a regular floppy with regular floppie disks. Infact, they have both been reletively loud and obnoxious compared to most of the floppy drives I've used.

Those sound like the first generation of LS-120. The first generation LS-120 was also rather fragile. There was a second generation of LS-120 that had a better sealed chassis to keep dust out. The second generation LS-120 was noticeably faster and a bit more rugged than the first generation LS-120.

There was an LS-250 as well, but it never did make to the USA. For one thing, the LS-250 was nearly a year late coming to market after the LS-120 triumvirate of Panasonic, 3M, and Mitsubishi announced when it would be available.

I suspect that the market for the LS-120 and LS-250 follow-up went rather swiftly into the toilet during the early stages of the LS-250 release. I saw where places had them for sale -- briefly, I might add -- in Japan and Australia, but never in the USA. It might have even been that the places that had them for sale were simply listing them in advance of receiving them, but they never actually showed up in the wholesale channels to be sold.

The LS-250 was supposed to be faster than the LS-120, and of course, would hold 250 MB on a SuperDisk 250 floppy. I believe it also had the ability to format regular 1.44 MB floppy discs to safely hold something like 10 MB for reading and writing only on an LS-250 drive. There was also a similar Sony floppy drive, but I don't recall it being compatible with regular floppy discs.

 

[sechs]

I would imagine there are some brand new old-stock LS-120 drives available somewhere for cheap.

Think again. I poked around, and new drives were $70+. Not worth it, in my opinion.

 

[Mercutio]

I have 3 dozen LS-120s sitting in storage. I hate them with a fiery passion (you should all know that's a bad thing).

For one thing, they're PIO mode 1 devices. Anything else on the same IDE chain with one is also a PIO mode 1 device. Hope you didn't want fast access to your CD-ROM drive!
For another thing - and this is an ancient thread in tech support here - some BIOSes refuse to see them as floppy drives. Oh, they get assigned drive A: and all is well, but not at boot time.
Finally, just like floppy drives, they're touchy and break easily. And only cost about 10x what a floppy drive does.

Still, if anyone wants one, I'll be happy to provide one, for cost of shipping.

 

[blakerwry]

i've never had any problem putting them on the same IDE cable as something else... or atleast the two that I've used (circa late 90's).


But you're right that some BIOSes dont see them as a floppy (i guess you'd say the BIOS doesn't have LS-120 support)

 

[Corvair]

...But you're right that some BIOSes dont see them as a floppy (i guess you'd say the BIOS doesn't have LS-120 support)...

None of them are going to see LS-120 drives as a floppy drives, since they aren't connecting to the conventional floppy port. However, if you have a full featured BIOS, you can set the BIOS to have ATAPI floppy devices to be emulated as a floppy drive.

Using Supermicro's BIOSes, I can have any version of Windows, MS-DOS, Netwrae, UNIX, Linux recognise an LS-120 as a "normal" floppy drive. Since I wouldn't have a conventional floppy drive installed, I disable the floppy controller (in BIOS). Next, I would set the proper IDE device address (primary / secondary, master / slave) to LS-120 (explicity), then finally set the IDE device address of the LS-120 to "ATAPI Device Emulated as Floppy Drive" and then I'm done. NOTE: The words I quote above may not be the exact words, but they are close.

 

[blakerwry]

none of the boards I've used mention it by that name, but you're right.. the term floppy emulation makes sense.

Come to think of it, I've never seen an option to have an ATAPI device emulate a floppy in any BIOS that I've used.

 

[GIANT]

Come to think of it, I've never seen an option to have an ATAPI device emulate a floppy in any BIOS that I've used.

I believe the floppy emulation is done with remapping of interrupt vectors during the downloading of the BIOS into low memory addresses at boot-time. The interrupt vector that's normally used for the operation of the floppy drive is remapped to the interrupt vector used by the IDE channel (primary or secondary) and address on that IDE channel (master or slave).

The computer then boots up and the LS-120, or presumably other read/write devices like a Zip Drive, will show up as Drive "A:" and not Drive "D:" or "E:" etc. The only gotcha in all of this is if you have a program that explicitly tries to communicate at low levels with the floppy using the address of the floppy drive controller. Otherwise, if the program makes calls to the floppy drive at BIOS level, then there won't be a problem.