A3000 with floptical - anyone ever see one?

[bbond007]

It seems the two technologies are opposites in a way. MO is an a optical medium aided by magnetism for writing, whereas the Floptical is a magnetic medium aided by optical tracking. Another opposite is that MO is very reliable.

Interesting... I never knew the difference.

I had (still have) an LS-120 floptical in my A1200.

I also got a Ricoh Magneto Optical drive for my A3000 around 1990 which cost me $5000.00 with all the disks totalling over 8GB in storage, which was like 7.5GB more than the largest Amiga BBS I knew of at the time

I did have my BBS running on OS/2 machine. I had a bunch of (used) Microscience 85MB MFM drives (retired from Novell Netware servers). I formatted them to 120MB using RLL controller. I added a secondary RLL controller. I remember having to change the default base address and cut the trace for the IRQ on the secondary controller.

[Zac67]

LS-120 aka Superdrive is using pretty much the same technology as floptical but uses another name for legal reasons.

[Nostalgiac]

I think (but could be wrong... ) that the old flopticals where the so called bernouille drives : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iomega_Bernoulli_Box

They used to be competition to the SyQuest drives.

LS-120 came later, as a counterpart to zip drives

I have had an unused LS-120 for years, without any media so never tried it.

TomUK

[Zac67]

Bernoulli and the derivative Zip drives use non-contact heads while floptical and LS heads do have contact with the media surface.

In contrast to harddrives - where the heads fly over or under a rigid surface - Bernoullis use flexible media that in turn fly under a rigid (yet radially moving) head.

[Motormouth]

Bernoulli and the derivative Zip drives use non-contact heads while floptical and LS heads do have contact with the media surface.

In contrast to harddrives - where the heads fly over or under a rigid surface - Bernoullis use flexible media that in turn fly under a rigid (yet radially moving) head.

Yes, and the Bernoulli drives used the "Bernoulli effect" (hence the name)  to pull the media to the desired distance from the head.