The 21MB Floptical 3½-inch disk

Floptical drives, introduced late in 1991 by Insite Peripherals Inc., a company founded by Jim Shugart, combine magnetical and optical technologies. Jump to: navigation, search Image File history File links Floptical_21MB.jpg 94 x 90 x 3,3mm (3½ inch) Floptical disk. ... Jump to: navigation, search Image File history File links Floptical_21MB.jpg 94 x 90 x 3,3mm (3½ inch) Floptical disk. ... Jump to: navigation, search 1991 is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... In physics, magnetism is one of the phenomena by which materials exert an attractive or repulsive force on other materials. ... See also list of optical topics. ...

The technology involved reading and writing data magnetically, and optically aligning the read/write head in the drive using grooves in the disc. This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...

Floptical disks were a high-capacity 3½-inch disks which provided 21MB of removable disk storage. The drive had variable dual heads so that it could read from and write to standard 720KB and 1.44MB 3½-inch floppy disks normally used with disk drives. A floppy disk is a data storage device that is composed of a circular piece of thin, flexible (i. ...

The optical servo tracks allowed for an increase in the tracking precision of the magnetic head, from the usual 135 tracks per inch to 1,250 tracks per inch. No laser or heating was involved; a simple infrared LED was used to follow the optical tracks. The magnetic head touched the recording surface. The range of sizes in which lasers exist is immense, extending from microscopic diode lasers (top) to football field sized neodymium glass lasers (bottom) used for inertial confinement fusion. ... Image of a small dog taken in mid-infrared (thermal) light (false color) Infrared (IR) radiation is electromagnetic radiation of a wavelength longer than visible light, but shorter than microwave radiation. ... Various light-emitting diodes (5 mm reds, 3 mm greens and yellows) A light-emitting diode (LED) is a semiconductor device that emits incoherent monochromatic light when electrically biased in the forward direction. ...

Iomega also made drives. The Iomega Corporation NYSE: IOM is a supplier of portable computer storage devices and media. ...

Around 70,000 flopticals are believed to have been sold worldwide in the product’s lifetime.

The term comes from a combination of floppy, as in floppy disk, and optical, referring to the LED.

Technical specifications

Defined by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) in December 1998, a mebibyte (MiB) is a unit of information or computer storage. ... Jump to: navigation, search A kibibyte (a contraction of kilo binary byte) is a unit of information or computer storage, commonly abbreviated KiB (never kiB). 1 kibibyte = 210 bytes = 1,024 bytes The kibibyte is closely related to the kilobyte, which can be used either as a synonym for kibibyte... For the Rise Against album, see Revolutions Per Minute (album). ... Run Length Limited, commonly RLL, is the most popular scheme for encoding data on hard disks. ... A megabit per second (Mbps or Mbit/s) is a unit of data transmission equal to 1,000 kilobits per second or 1,000,000 bits per second. ... A millisecond is an SI-derived unit of time, equal to one thousandth of a second. ... A byte is commonly used as a unit of storage measurement in computers, regardless of the type of data being stored. ... Jump to: navigation, search SCSI stands for Small Computer System Interface, and is a standard interface and command set for transferring data between devices on both internal and external computer buses. ...

See also

Magneto-optical drive !!! Double article, please see also Magneto-optical disc !!! Magneto-optical disc A Magneto-optical disc and the numerous rectangles on its surface A magneto-optical drive is a kind of optical disc drive capable of writing and rewriting data upon magneto-optical discs. ...