Still need to use the venerable, yet outmoded, floppy disk? Own a Lombard?
Never fear for SuperDisk is here!! Yes, those extremely kind folks at VST
Technologies have done it again, given us what Cupertino did not-an expansion
bay SuperDisk.
Here is a quick look at its performance in informal testing: a 5.1 meg
folder took 55 seconds to copy. Do the math and you find a whopping 0.092
megs./sec.. To be fair I tried this four times and consistently came up with
50 to 55 seconds. Also in the name of fairness I tried a larger folder
weighing in at 24.7 megs.. The tedium lasted 5 minutes and ten seconds.
Again doing the math (24.7m/310s) a transfer rate of 0.080 megs./sec.. It
slows just slightly. Enough of the all to popular 120 meg format, on to
floppies (dead media?)
Now the performance of the module as a floppy drive: a 252k file was chosen
(having just shopped around for big files, this is small/medium for a floppy)
and it clocked in at 22 seconds. Doing the math and adding in another
division by 1000 so as to have comparable numbers a transfer rate of 0.011
was found, seven times slower than the superdisk!? Another try or two came
in between 20 and 22 seconds. To confirm the transfer rate as a floppy drive
I decided to take two more files one smaller and one larger. The 12k file I
chose took 4 seconds (0.003 m/s) and the 1 meg. file I picked took 2 minutes
(exactly) which turns out to be 0.008 m/s.
Despite its speed (or lack thereof), it consistently works. Compared to a
hard disk or ethernet removable media is slow period. Beyond the informal
testing numbers, which sound worse because I have couched them in hard drive
speed terms, the drive does not perform all that poorly. Aesthetically the
drive looks nice and fits extremely well into the expansion bay. If you look
closely at the pictures of the inserted module, you will notice an increasing
gap along the upper edge of the module and the powerbook body. This is due
to both Apple's design of the expansion bay and the VST Superdisk module's
slightly loose fit. A simple squeeze of that edge of the powerbook brings
the two edges together perfectly.
It is a bit noisy with superdisks, but not much more so than an old floppy
drive. While as a floppy it is quieter, it is also much slower. I must
reiterate the consistency factor. This module worked with each floppy and
superdisk I fed it. However, I did notice that the Eject command from the
Special menu caused a significantly slower ejection of a floppy as opposed to
the old drag it to the trash method (VST's module or Apple's software, you
decide). Minus the speed factor, this is a good addition to add superdisks
and floppies to your Lombard's arsenal. Those capabilities are crucial for
me since many of my students use another type of computer, they often have
printing problems and thus increasingly hand me their essay or research paper
on a floppy-at least my computer, thanks to the VST module, can read it and
print it...if it could only grade it.
Images:
Removed from PowerBook
Inserted and closed
Inserted and open
