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As someone who didn’t grow up with floppy disks, why were floppy drives topping out at a few megabytes, but Zip drives managed a hundred in the same size? It’s

As someone who didn’t grow up with floppy disks, why were floppy drives topping out at a few megabytes, but Zip drives managed a hundred in the same size? It’s quite a jump in capacity.

kenny11 6y ago
Advancement in technology, just like a CD tops out at 650 MB but a Blu-ray disc can store 50 GB on the same-sized plastic disc.
codeulike 6y ago
Better/more fine control of the read-write heads leading to more dense information storage. Floppy discs used a stepper motor, Zip drives used something more like a modern hard disc actuator, see https://hddsurgery.com/blog/hdd-actuator https://hddsurgery.com/blog/hdd-actuator
- pmiller2 6y ago
  This is mostly it. The floating head, plus the much smaller head size is what allows a more dense packing of tracks per inch on the disk. It's almost like having a mini HD where the platter is removable.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
    platter is removable I remember repairing discs by swapping to the shell of a new one when something like the mini spring broke.
    - pmiller2 6y ago
      Hah, fair enough. I suppose I should have said "designed to be removable." :)
  - rainbowzootsuit 6y ago
    I had SyQuest 105MB and then later iomega Zip drives. The SyQuest cartridges had a translucent shell and it was a shiny metallic HDD platter in there while. When you put in a platter you got a whole sound of the HDD whir to spin up and then clackity-clack when the heads loaded and started moving around. Always a little tension until the drive mounted. I think the Zip used more of a brown plastic type of disk. The loading was more of a low chunck-chunck sound. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyQuest_Technology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyQuest_Technology
janzer 6y ago
Basically just technology improving over time. Just looking at wikipedia, 5.25" was introduced in 1976 not clear at what capacity but it fairly early on settled into 360KB. The 3.5" was introduced in 1982 at 720KB with 1.44MB broadly used by late 1980's. The Zip drive was introduced in late 1994 with 100MB capacity and was later expanded up to 750MB. But by that time CD-ROM technology with its cheaper media and less proprietary nature was very much replacing the magnetic based portable storage media.
aidenn0 6y ago
If your definition of "floppy" is just the form-factor than 3.5" floppies topped out around 240MB[1]. If you mean the actual magnetic media (not flopptical[2]) then the same drives could format a standard double-sided high-density 3.5" floppy to 32MB, which is only an 8x difference. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk 2: The technical reason why these disks could have higher density was due to being able to use optical elements as a servo-mechanism, rather than just using dead-reckoning like a floppy would. This required the disk to be printed with marks that had high contrast in the infrared range.

As someone who didn’t grow up with floppy disks, why were floppy drives topping out at a few megabytes, but Zip drives managed a hundred in the same size? It’s quite a jump in capacity.

kenny11 6y ago

Advancement in technology, just like a CD tops out at 650 MB but a Blu-ray disc can store 50 GB on the same-sized plastic disc.

codeulike 6y ago

Better/more fine control of the read-write heads leading to more dense information storage. Floppy discs used a stepper motor, Zip drives used something more like a modern hard disc actuator, see https://hddsurgery.com/blog/hdd-actuator https://hddsurgery.com/blog/hdd-actuator

pmiller2 6y ago
This is mostly it. The floating head, plus the much smaller head size is what allows a more dense packing of tracks per inch on the disk. It's almost like having a mini HD where the platter is removable.
- ineedasername 6y ago
  platter is removable I remember repairing discs by swapping to the shell of a new one when something like the mini spring broke.
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    Hah, fair enough. I suppose I should have said "designed to be removable." :)
- rainbowzootsuit 6y ago
  I had SyQuest 105MB and then later iomega Zip drives. The SyQuest cartridges had a translucent shell and it was a shiny metallic HDD platter in there while. When you put in a platter you got a whole sound of the HDD whir to spin up and then clackity-clack when the heads loaded and started moving around. Always a little tension until the drive mounted. I think the Zip used more of a brown plastic type of disk. The loading was more of a low chunck-chunck sound. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyQuest_Technology https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SyQuest_Technology

janzer 6y ago

Basically just technology improving over time. Just looking at wikipedia, 5.25" was introduced in 1976 not clear at what capacity but it fairly early on settled into 360KB. The 3.5" was introduced in 1982 at 720KB with 1.44MB broadly used by late 1980's. The Zip drive was introduced in late 1994 with 100MB capacity and was later expanded up to 750MB. But by that time CD-ROM technology with its cheaper media and less proprietary nature was very much replacing the magnetic based portable storage media.

aidenn0 6y ago

If your definition of "floppy" is just the form-factor than 3.5" floppies topped out around 240MB[1]. If you mean the actual magnetic media (not flopptical[2]) then the same drives could format a standard double-sided high-density 3.5" floppy to 32MB, which is only an 8x difference. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDisk 2: The technical reason why these disks could have higher density was due to being able to use optical elements as a servo-mechanism, rather than just using dead-reckoning like a floppy would. This required the disk to be printed with marks that had high contrast in the infrared range.