SuperDrive

A drive most prevalent in the recent Apple G4, the SuperDrive can write to both CD-RW and DVD-R media. Part of Apple's push for desktop movies, which they believe will be as big as desktop publishing was when the original Macintosh started it. Used with the included DVD design and burning software, iDVD.

The original use of the term was for an early innovative floppy disk drive, which was capable of supporting (via firmware and system software extensions) many disk formats, including AppleDOS (800K & 1.44Mb), MS-DOS (800K & 1.44Mb) and Apple's own HFS (400K (read-only) 800K & 1.44Mb).

The units were manufactured by Sony of Japan, introduced with the NuBus-based Macintosh II, and were finally obsoleted with the launch of the legacy free iMac.

The Superdrive was a 120 MB floppy-like drive for PCs that also supported regular 3.5" floppy disks and was manufactured by Imation. While they were really just LS-120 drives, Imation took it upon themselves to give it a snappy name and market them like crazy, hoping to overtake the well-established Zip drive. They failed horribly. HP was the only computer manufacturer to integrate the Superdrive into a couple of its systems. The 120 MB disks were also expensive and Iomega's 250 MB Zip drive had just come out with similar prices for its media. The only real advantage the Superdrive had was that it could take the place of a regular floppy drive. This was obviously not enough of an advantage, though, as Imation dropped support for the Superdrive only after 6 months because of the dismal sales.