The SuperDisk is so super, it’s now available from multiple vendors. Winstation Corp. is selling a USB SuperDisk Drive, which is just as Bondi as Imation’s. The SuperDisk can read and write Mac and PC formatted 3.5-inch floppy diskettes as well as Mac and PC formatted SuperDisks. A SuperDisk can hold 120 MB of data. Street price for just the drive is $150, approximately the same price as Imation’s SuperDisk. A five-pack of Mac-formatted SuperDisk Diskettes is about $65.
No surprise, the Winstation SuperDisk is also just as slow as the Imation version. It’s about half the speed of the Iomega Zip drive but faster than a floppy. On a 20 MB file copy we saw transfer rates of about 2 MB/second–well under the USB port’s maximum throughput of 12 MB/second.
There is one big gotcha with the Winstation drive. Newer iMacs come with some popular USB drivers pre-installed, including the Imation SuperDisk software. The Winstation drive comes with a CD containing the Winstation version of the SuperDisk drivers. When both sets of drivers are loaded, a SuperDisk shows up on the desktop twice. The OS will let you copy files to either icon, which can cause data loss. To solve this problem you can skip loading the Winstation software, or go into the Extensions folder and throw away the USB SuperDisk Driver, and the USB SuperDisk UT Driver.
For more information, please call 509-765-7759 or go to www.winstation.com.