SuperDrive

SuperDrive is a trademark used by Apple Inc. for two different storage drives: from 1988–99 to refer to a high-density floppy disk drive capable of reading all major 3.5″ disk formats; and from 2001 onwards to refer to a CD/DVD reader/writer.

The terms DVD Multi, Super AllWrite and Super Multi are used to describe optical disc drives from non-Apple manufacturers.

The term was first used by Apple Computer in 1988 to refer to their 1.40 MB 3.5 inch floppy drive. This replaced the older 800 KB floppy drive that had been standard in the Macintosh up to then, but remained compatible in that it could continue to read and write both 800 KB (double-sided) and 400 KB (single-sided) floppy disks, as well as the then-new high-density floppies.

This drive was also capable of reading and writing MS-DOS formatted disks and FAT12 file formats, using PC Exchange or other software, unlike the 400 KB and 800 KB drives. This was made possible as the SuperDrive now utilitized the same MFM (Modified Frequency Modulation) encoding scheme used by the IBM PC, yet still retained backward compatibility with Apple's variable-speed zoned CAV scheme and Group Code Recording encoding format, so it could continue to read Macintosh MFS, HFS and Apple II ProDOS formats on 400/800 KB disks.

Introduced in 1988 under the Trademark name FDHD (Floppy Disk High Density), the subsequently renamed SuperDrive was known primarily as an internally mounted floppy drive that was part of the Macintosh computer; however, an external version of the drive was manufactured that came in a Snow White-styled plastic case.

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