SuperDisk

According to Apple floppies are passé. But tell that to the many Mac users who have floppies with important files, applications, and software keys. Imation’s SuperDisk Drive is an external USB device that reads and writes standard High-Density 1.44MB floppy disks as well their own high capacity 120MB SuperDisk diskettes. If you need a drive to read floppies, and you’re also looking for a drive to transfer and back up files, the Imation SuperDisk fits the bill. It’s cheaper and more convenient than getting two drives.

However, this multi-format convenience comes with a major drawback. Although Imation has improved the speed of the SuperDisk, it is still slow when compared to an Iomega Zip Drive. Also, the SuperDisk diskettes hold 120MB of information, compared to the 250MB of the newer Iomega disks, which go for approximately the same price per disk.

Setup was a breeze as the drive uses USB drivers included in OS 8.6 and later. Owners of iMacs, Power Mac G3s and Power Mac G4s do not need to install drivers and can begin using the drive immediately.

Reference systems in italics. Best results in Bold. Finder copy scores are in seconds.

We tested each drive on a 350MHz iMac with Mac OS 9, 64MB of RAM, a 2MB system disk cache, and Virtual Memory disabled. –Macworld Lab testing supervised by Jason Cox