Just out of curiosity, why aren’t they more common? The convenience of a floppy disk, storage capacity of about 21 megs, you’d think people would be buying them left and right and that they would be standard on computers, but yet you hardly hear anything about them. Why is that?
The main reason is the existance of CDRW drives. These things cost roughly the same as floptical drives, and the disks cost FAR less than floptical disks. Add together 30 times the storage space and about the same speed difference, as well as universal compatibility and fewer bugs, and you have a winner. Don’t forget the fact that you have to practically shoot a CDR disc to keep it from being readable.
I myself purchased an Imation Superdisk drive back in 1997 when they were around $60, and CDR drives were a couple hundred bucks for the cheapest model. The drive was slow, I could only use the disks in my own computer, and I couldn’t boot off of them. Not to mention $12 per disk, 120MB capacity, and low reliability. It was a decent choice back then, but nowadays its just a waste of money compared to an $80 CDRW drive and $1 per CD for 700MB CDRW disks.
FDISK
Wow, I didn’t realize that CD’s cost so little and held so much. Well, guess that answers my question. Thanks.
You can get a 100 pack of CDRs (650 MB) for $25 including shipping now. They have gotten very cheap.
Yes, generic 74 minute CDRs are very cheap, but 80 minute CDRW discs are slightly more rare and expensive. I’ve actually had a good deal of trouble finding them in any local office supply store.
FDISK
a) Don’t EVER invest in any new technology with the word “Flop” in the brand name.
b) They were slow. I mean, it was faster and more convenient to access 21 megs of data on a floptical than to access 21 megs on 15 separate floppies, I guess, but when you inserted one, it would spin up, wonk, gank, honk, rrurr, whirr, wheeep, zurk, zonk, tunk, and rrrurr yet again before successfully mounting on the Desktop.
c) I would not say it was the CD-R or CD-RW that killed them. Heck, they were in the morgue by the time the Zip drive made its debut. The Floptical was unable to compete with the SyQuest or the Iomega Bernoulli, really; the drives themselves weren’t any cheaper (or not enough cheaper to make up for the much more limited storage space), and the storage medium was more expensive per megabyte. By the time I sold mine on eBay around 1997 or 1998, you really had to look around to find blank floptical diskettes, and Zip cartridges were ubiquitous and cheaper.