Floptical

1993 June 21, advertisement, InfoWorld, page 12, Floptical technology is a practical and affordable way to increase your storage capacity— without giving up the convenience of diskettes.

Optical technology appears in many forms of devices, starting from CD-ROM (Compact Disk Read Only Memory) disks, to floptical disk (optical floppy disks) to very high capacity (up to 20 GB) optical disks.

Alternatives to tape and CD-R include floptical disks, Bernoulli boxes, and other removable drives.

Like floppy drives on steroids, flopticals use laser optics to store up to 21MB of data on one 3½-inch disk. The advantages of flopticals are a low buy-in cost ($400 and under) and the convenience of using the drive for your current library of 1.44MB and 720K disks (as well as IBM′s 2.88MB disks).

You said you are using flopticals in your sound studio? Is that where you use it mostly?

Flopticals, once promising, have mostly been shoved aside by improvements in capacity and price for older designs that are still around and new devices, such as the Zip and SuperDisk LS-120 drives.