History
The design of the SuperDisk system came from an early 1990s project at Iomega. It is one of the last examples of floptical technology, where lasers are used to guide a magnetic head which is much smaller than those used in traditional floppy disk drives. Iomega orphaned the project around the time they decided to release the Zip drive in 1994. The idea eventually ended up at 3M, where the concept was refined and the design was licensed to established floppy drive makers Matsushita (Panasonic) and Mitsubishi. Other companies involved in the development of SuperDisk included Compaq and OR Technology.
Matsushita continued development of the technology and released the LS-240, which was still fairly available in Asia and Australia until 2003 but is now quite rare. It has double the capacity and the added feature of being able to format regular floppy disks to 32 MB capacity. However, this higher density comes at a price - the entire disk must be rewritten any time a change is made, much like early CD-RW media.
A SuperDisk drive was used in two Panasonic digital cameras, the PV-SD4090 and PV-SD5000, which allowed them to use both SuperDisk (LS120) and 3.5" floppy disks as the memory media.
Read more about this topic: SuperDisk
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