Technical Information
The SuperDisk's format was designed to supersede the floppy disk with its higher-capacity media that imitated the then ubiquitous format with its own 120MB (and later 240MB) disk storage while the SuperDisk drive itself was backwards compatible with 1.44 MB and 720 KB floppy formats (MFM). Superdisk drives read and write faster to these sorts of disks than conventional 1.44 MB or 720 KB floppy drives, due to the faster IDE interface. The newer LS-240 drives also have the ability to read and write regular 1.44 MB floppies at much higher densities.
The true capacity of these "SD120MB" drives is 120.375 MiB aka 126.22 MB (FAT16B with logical geometry 963/8/32 CHS × 512 bytes). The "SD240MB" drives have a capacity of 229.25 MiB aka 240.39 MB (FAT16B with logical geometry 262/32/56 CHS × 512 bytes). 1.44 MB HD floppies formatted to 32 MB as "FD32MB" (FAT16B with logical geometry 1024/2/32 CHS × 512 bytes) in the LS-240 show a dummy FAT12 file system (with logical geometries 160/2/9 or 80/2/18) when inserted into a normal floppy drive.
SuperDisk drives have been sold in parallel port, USB, ATAPI and SCSI variants. All drives can read and write 1.44 MB and 720 KiB MFM floppies, as used on PCs, Apple Macintoshes (High Density format only, see below), and many workstations. 2.88 MB floppy formats are not supported.
Imation also released a version of the SuperDisk with "Secured Encryption Technology" which uses Blowfish with a 64-bit key to encrypt the contents.
Read more about this topic: SuperDisk
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