NEW FLOPPY HOLDS 80 OLD DISKS' WORTH.

Byline: Janet Rae-Dupree San Jose Mercury News 

It looks like a floppy, acts like a floppy, spins like a floppy - but it sure doesn't store like a floppy.

And for data-hungry consumers, that is a very good thing.

The new LS-120 floppy disk announced last week by 3M and Matsushita-Kotobuki Electronics Industries Ltd. is identical in size to today's floppy disks but has more storage room than most home desktop computers did just four years ago.

There is enough data crammed inside the LS-120's bronze-and-black casing to overflow 80 of the ubiquitous old-style floppy disks.

As internal hard disk storage capacities swelled nearly a thousandfold in the past decade, floppy disk storage capacity remained exactly where it began - at 1.44 megabytes, about the size of a best-selling novel.

So the new 120-megabyte floppy disk and its fancy new drive has the computer world spinning with anticipation.

"This is unique because it's the first real product of its kind to hit the market," said Fara Yale, a computer storage analyst at Dataquest Inc. "Yes, I'm impressed."

So is Compaq Computer Corp., which has decided to put the new high-capacity floppy drive in two of its Deskpro office computers as a standard feature starting April 2.

The thing about the new drives that has the industry so excited is that they can use the cheap old 3-1/2-inch floppies - which average about 50 cents each - just as easily as they can use the significantly more expensive newfangled floppies, which will be sold at an initial retail price of $19.95.

But don't expect your current computer to be able to read the LS-120. Consumers who want to use the new floppies will have to pay about $200 to replace their old floppy drive with a new one that can take advantage of the LS-120's features.

The new floppy combines both optical and magnetic storage technology to cram bits of data into place.

At 3M's Oklahoma factory, the LS-120 disks are etched with a series of optical "stitches," or tracks, to guide the drive's heads.

"Laser servos" (hence LS) will move along the optical stitching much as magnetic servos do on today's floppies.

In an industry where a single spreadsheet file can contain 2 million bits of data and a single digital photograph downloaded off the Internet can chew up more than 50 million data bits, consumers have been demanding simple, cheap ways to store things. Many computer users had simply stopped backing up their hard disks because they didn't have the time or energy to feed hundreds of disks into their computer's maw.

While 3M and MKE are the first to announce a high-capacity floppy, the two companies are not the first to try to meet the need for an alternative to the old 1.44-megabyte disks.

Other companies have been immensely successful selling specialized drives that use cartridges capable of storing more than 100 megabytes - or 100 million bits of data. Magnetic tape drive makers have provided efficient - if slow - ways to back up entire hard drives without using floppies.

But the LS-120 is the first product intended to completely replace old-style floppy drives.