Magnetic media technology has come a long way since the days of 8 inch single sided floppies. With companies perfecting their optical/magnetic recording technologies all over the place, competition for your mass-storage dollar is getting fierce.

I'll wager you can think of at least three big name mass storage products right off the top of your head. Iomega's ubiquitous Zip and Jaz disks, Syquest's Sparq drives, and Seagate tape drives abound. A lesser known contender is the Superdisk, or the LS-120 to us nerds.

The LS-120 system is the brainchild of 3M (or Imation, whichever you prefer) and is the bastard child of CDROM and floppy disk technology. LS-120 drives use optical sensors to stay on track, like a CD drive, but use magnetism to store the actual information. You can cram 120 megabytes (real 1024 kilobyte megabytes, not 1000 kilobyte marketing hype megabytes) onto a single LS-120 disk, and more if you use compression. The disks are physically the same size as regular 3.5 inch floppy disks, so they'll fit in your fancy-pants disk wallets and card files, too. To top it all of, the LS-120 drives can read regular 3.5 inch floppies, and considerably faster than your regular disk drive can.

Except for the parallel LS-120 drive, that is. I bought a the parallel model of the LS-120 drive because I aleady have two disk drives in my machine, as well as two CDROMS and two hard drives. Since I'm strapped for drive bays (and free IDE connectors) I really had no choice.

Physically, the external LS-120 is pretty unremarkable. It's squat, it's beige, its metal, and it sits on your desk. Since the device hogs a parallel port, and most modern machines only have one, the drive has a passthrough connector on it so you can daisy-chain on a printer or somesuch.

Installation is easy: Plug it into your parallel port and install the driver and you're off with nary a hitch. On your next reboot you have a new drive on your list, which behaves exactly as you'd expect it to.

Apart from the godawful noise it makes when you fire it up, the parallel LS-120's major downfall is its speed. Rather, its lack thereof. Since parallel connections have very limited bandwidth, the drive can't read or write information very fast. If you're only using it for backups, or you don't need the speed, this drive will work just fine for you. There's certainly nothing WRONG with it, it's just confined to the limitations of its connection. The drive also requires a power brick to operate, so any hopes of using it on the road with your laptop just went out the window, unless you can find an outlet someplace.

Alright, so just how slow is it? Let's do the numbers, shall we?

By my watch it takes 14.28 seconds to copy exactly one megabyte of data from RAM to the LS-120 drive when it's loaded with a 120 megabyte disk. It takes 12.38 seconds to transfer the same file to the LS-120 drive when it is loaded with a regular 1.44 megabyte floppy. By contrast, it takes 41.16 seconds for a regular 3.5 inch floppy drive to stuff the same one megabyte file on a disk.

The external LS-120 is strange. It reports the file as copied almost instantly, but the drive stays chugging away and refuses to let you access it until it stops. My guess is the file is still being copied during that time, and the driver is being nice enough to let you get on with your life in the meantime. I factored this in and timed how long it was between the time I gave the computer the copy command and the time I was allowed to access the file I had copied.

The internal IDE LS-120's suffer from no speed crimp at all, in case you're wondering. I use one at work, and it moves and a decent clip with both the special 120 meg disks and regular floppies. If you want the speed, I recommend you get one of those- It only takes my internal LS-120 7.42 seconds to dump the one megabyte file to a 120 meg disk, and 7.55 seconds to write it to a regular floppy.

The upside of the LS-120 drives is their media is cheap. Not only are the LS-120 disks physically smaller than their Zip disk rivals, but they hold 20 megs more and cost a few bucks less. I can get a five pack of the things for less than 10 dollars at my local Kmart, while a three pack of the Zips is about 12 bucks. Not to shabby, as far a specialized mass storage media goes.

All in all, recommended for some, not recommended for others. It's your call.

Recommended: Yes