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The 21MB Floptical 3½-inch disk

Floptical refers to a type of disk drive that combines magnetic and optical technologies to store large amounts of data on media similar to 3½-inch floppy disks. The name is a portmanteau of the words 'floppy' and 'optical'. It refers specifically to one brand of drive, but is also used more generically to refer to any system using similar techniques.

The original Floptical technology was introduced late in 1991 by Insite Peripherals, a venture funded company set up by Jim Adkisson, one of the key engineers behind the original 5¼-inch floppy disk drive development at Shugart Associates in 1976. The main shareholders were Maxell, Iomega and 3M.

Contents

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* 1 Technical aspects

o 1.1 Technical specifications

* 2 Market performance

* 3 Operating system support

* 4 See also

* 5 References

[edit] Technical aspects

The technology involved reading and writing data magnetically, while optically aligning the read/write head in the drive using grooves in the disc being sensed by an infra-red LED. The magnetic head touched the recording surface, as it does in a normal floppy drive. The optical servo tracks allowed for an increase in the tracking precision of the magnetic head, from the usual 135 tracks per inch to 1,250 tracks per inch. Floptical disks provided 21 MB of storage. The drive had a second set of read/write heads so that it could read from and write to standard 720 KB and 1.44 MB (1,440 KiB) disks as well.

To allow for a high degree of compatibility with existing SCSI host adapters, Floptical drives were designed to work as a floppy, and not as a removable hard disk. To ensure this, a "write lockout" feature was added in the firmware. This effectively inhibited writing (including any kind of formatting) of the media. It was possible to unlock the drive by issuing a SCSI Mode Sense Command, 1A 00 20 02 A0. It is unclear how much of a problem this was, and Insite also issued EPROMs where this "feature" was not present.

At least two models were produced, one with a manual lever that mechanically ejected the disc from the drive, and another with a small pinhole into which a paperclip could be inserted, in case the device rejected or ignored SCSI eject commands.

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