LS-120 SuperDisk or Zip Drives

This is a category of removable mass storage drives, in a sense. Both of these drives use a diskette that looks almost exactly like a normal 3 1/2" diskette, but the inside is different. The diskette part (inside the plastic housing) is a very special type that will store massive amouts of data, compared to the normal dikette. The Zip drive diskette will hold 100 Mb of data, compared to the normal diskettes 1.44 Mb, while the LS-120 SuperDisk will hold 120 Mb.

The LS-120 SuperDisk has the advantage of being backwardly compatabile with the normal 3 1/2" floppy drive - that is, it can read and write to a normal 3 1/2" floppy diskette, either the 720 Kb or 1.44 Mb type, as well as the special LS-120 diskette. The Zip drive will only read and write it's specially designed diskettes.

The advantages of this type drive should be obvious. They are wonderful for backing up sensitive data and great for transporting large files from one computer to another. It is easy to keep large chunks of seldom used data in a quickly accessable format, freeing up valuable hard drive space for other uses.

The disadvantages are less obvious. The transfer of data, to and from the special diskettes, is slow by hard drive standards. They transfer data faster than a normal floppy drive, for instance, but slower than a CD-ROM drive. Once you place data on one of the special diskettes, it can only be read by another drive of the same type. That means you would have to equip several computers with these drives just so you could move information between them via the special diskettes, and that can be expensive. The LS-120 can replace your normal 3 1/2" floppy in most computers, as an LS-120 drive is a bootable device - but for most of us that is still not a savings.

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