floptical

English

3½-inch floptical disk

Alternative forms

• Floptical

Etymology

Blend of floppy (“floppy disk, a magnetic data storage device”) +‎ optical.

Adjective

floptical (not comparable)

1. (computing, data storage) Using a combination of magnetic and optical technology.
   • 1993 June 21, advertisement, InfoWorld, page 12,

     Floptical technology is a practical and affordable way to increase your storage capacity— without giving up the convenience of diskettes.

   • 2004, S. Sadagopan, Management Information Systems‎^[1], page 62:

     Optical technology appears in many forms of devices, starting from CD-ROM (Compact Disk Read Only Memory) disks, to floptical disk (optical floppy disks) to very high capacity (up to 20 GB) optical disks.

   • 2006, Vicki Stanfield, Roderick W. Smith, Linux System Administration, page 270:

     Alternatives to tape and CD-R include floptical disks, Bernoulli boxes, and other removable drives.

Noun

floptical (plural flopticals)

1. A floptical disk.
   • 1995, Eric Knorr, The PC Bible‎^[2], page 74:

     Like floppy drives on steroids, flopticals use laser optics to store up to 21MB of data on one 3½-inch disk. The advantages of flopticals are a low buy-in cost ($400 and under) and the convenience of using the drive for your current library of 1.44MB and 720K disks (as well as IBM′s 2.88MB disks).

   • 1997, Lee Purcell, David Martin, The Complete Recordable-CD Guide, page 461:

     You said you are using flopticals in your sound studio? Is that where you use it mostly?

   • 2007, Corey Sandler, chapter 11, in Fix Your Own PC, page 5:

     Flopticals, once promising, have mostly been shoved aside by improvements in capacity and price for older designs that are still around and new devices, such as the Zip and SuperDisk LS-120 drives.

Related terms

• floptical disk
• floptical drive