Floptical drives, introduced late in 1991 by Insite Peripherals Inc., a company founded by Jim Shugart, combine magnetism and optical technologies.

The Technology involved reading and writing data magnetically, and optically aligning the read/write head in the drive using grooves in the disc.

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.

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.

Iomega also made drives.

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

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

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