David & Troy,
>> You say the Sony head also floats like a Zip and won't have that problem. If so how will it track all the soft old floppies out there which don't have the high tech Fuji ATOMM media <<
This is not what "I" said, this is what Sony/Fuji said.
HiFD is not release yet so I don't want to make any concrete statement but AFAIK HiFD use a dual gap read head which allow it to read 2 different media types. For magnetic data storage, you don't need to "touch" the media to retrieve data but it is cheaper and easier that way, especially we are talking about a early 80s technology. My purpose was just to correct your statement that HiFD "ride" on the media thus the reliability must be poor.
>> Even then it would probably have a serious impact on the media life of the 1.44MB disk. <<
Again, we are talking about a product which still under development, the HiFD will likely slow down to sub-1000rpm speed when dealing with 1.44MB floppy so this is not a problem. The fact that the HiFD can read 3 times faster than write indicate that it has variable speed for the HiFD media also.
>> With the flying head scheme, the HiFd head must be very close to the 200MB media, and the 200MB media must be very smooth. If the delicate HiFd head comes anywhere near so close to the 1.44MB media it will have huge canyons carved in it, and plenty of media deposits to boot. <<
I don't know the detail about how HiFD r/w the 1.44MB floppy but I "guess" the HiFD will be no worst than a regular FDD. Also while 1.44MB is still essential today, they are rarely use because they are not reliable and small (I never trust my data on removable magnetic data storage including Zip, SparQ and tape drive). I use it mainly to transfer small amount of data and driver updates.
Backward compatibility isn't that hard to achieve, in the worst case you just need an additional r/w head. A friend of mine has a Compaq equipped with a LS-120, he never have any problem to use 1.44MB floppy. The problem why Iomega cannot do it is mostly because its decision on a different form factor at the first place. If Zip is backward compatible to 1.44MB Floppy, we probably see it on every single PC sold today already.
aC |
