Couldn't Toss

Still digging through the same box as yesterday, I found an LS-120 drive.

Also called the SuperDisk, though writing that in 2026, hardly anyone will recognize the name. Compatible with the 3.5-inch floppy, but on the dedicated media it held 120MB. Roughly eighty times a floppy. A dream of a capacity at the time.

The cable was IDE, not the floppy ribbon. It replaced the FDD outright, and it still read regular floppies. I thought it was perfect.

I hardly used it. Still, it was my pick — I believed in a future where it would become the default. Looking back, of course it was a long shot. USB sticks on one side, CD-R on the other. It couldn't beat either.

Dig through the box and more of them keep turning up — the ones that didn't make it.

MD bloomed in the gap between the CD Walkman and the MP3 player, then handed the lead to the iPod. But it caught on in car audio, and that stubbornness kept it around — you still run into them. USB-connected MD drives go for serious money at auction these days. Apparently there are still people loading new music from a PC onto MDs to play on the car's deck.

MO, with its magneto-optical mechanism and a tough cartridge, stuck around for years as the delivery format of choice for Japanese government and corporate offices. Nobody pushed it loudly. That quietness turned straight into longevity.

DAT began as a dream of high-end audio, never quite spread to consumers, and retreated into the server room to survive. Even readers who don't know what a DAT tape is may know the one in Evangelion. The anime, in a way, gave DAT a cultural afterlife.

The survivors found their seats backstage, not under the stage lights. DAT and LTO have been quietly turning in a corner of the data center, doing backup duty. I tried to buy an LTO drive a few times. Even LTO-4 isn't priced for the hobbyist.

The flashier a format's consumer entrance, the flashier the exit. Only the ones that retreated into business use stuck around. The tape that survived was LTO.

So, back to the LS-120. The dedicated media came out next to the drive. If I throw all of this away now, I'll probably never see a real SuperDisk again in my life. I doubt it's even in a museum.

I quietly closed the parts box.