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IBM 1GB Microdrive Review
A reader writes "MP3 Newswire has run a very good review on the 1GB version of IBM's Microdrive. One major improvement the higher-capacity Microdrive has over the older 340MB drive is that it consumes less power (the older drives sucked up the juice). The article covers the normal ins and outs of the product, but also touches on the future. Because flash cards and other competing storage media this small havent reached the 1GB plateau (yet) these drives are good enough to steal a large slice of the MP3 player/PDA/Digital Camera pie by simply slashing prices to allow, say, a tiny 1GB MP3 portable for under $250. "
Is it just me, or haven't these 1GB drives been out for a *while* now? It's not like this is a review of something that *just* came out...
Now if they only got CHEAPER at the same time...
($369 for a 1Gig drive is not exactly what I call a new MP3 jukebox in the making)
I am !amused.
Do you think that 1GB of storage space in something that small could be applied to PDAs or MP3 players? This has other ramifications too, beyond simply being a superfloppy.
Everything is mainstream now.
Hmmm. With 1GB storage getting so cheap, I wonder if we'll see non DVD portable viseo players coming soon. Why not? VCD movies are supported by DVD players, and it wouldn't be expensive to add a hard drive to store other mpeg/avi movies.
I'd buy one.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
It doesn't have the advantage of no moving parts. Drop a mp3 player with a hard drive in it and you get a dead hard drive.
Yea! Eventually we can do longer pr0n shoots with 1GB-capable digital cameras.
Small expensive things are always bad. Not only that, but the high capacity of this drive means that you could potentially lose a LOT of data on one of these things. Looks Dangerous.
Everything is mainstream now.
I'm still waiting for Bacteriorhodopsin Memory to hit the market... Sci-Am did an article _years_ ago, and apparently there's been some successful 'wet-bench' runs since then...
Wonder if you have to feed the things or flush out the waste on a regular basis...
Ken
An OPEN mind is a beautiful thing...
Why is there such an emphasis placed on RPMs? i.e. 7200 versus 5400 versus 3600, etc: RPM is used as the metric regarding the performance of a hard drive. Yet, correct me if I'm wrong (as if I need to even say that :-]), is it not true that one RPM on one drive can represent a vastly different amount of data than one RPM on a different drive?
Does anyone know if this drive works on FreeBSD?
the ipod has a small 5gb drive in it
Maybe they got it wrong and forgot a decimal point. That must be it! These HDs are just like RAM. $2.50 for 1 gig. It's funny, RAM is cheaper than these dirves.
"It's the little touches that make a future solid enough to be destroyed" --William S. Bourroughs
Why is it so impossible for supposed "technology writers" to get simple things like GB and MB straight? I mean, it's obvious what was meant, but c'mon! How can that slip past both the writer AND the editor? It's almost as bad as Slashdot, for chrissakes...
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
Yeah!!!! Now what was I supposed to write about?....
:)
Oh yeah,... I work for the college I attend and we were able to get a FujiFilm S1 digital SLR for our office with a 1GB IBM Microdrive... It's really remarkable hardware. I'm a big fan of it and of the CF2 interface standard... It's nice and extensible. I would love to see a CF2 reader for Handspring Visors (right now there's just CF1). That's where we get into cool EFC-style globals.
Did you see that shock spec? This little thing can take 1500G of shock (non-operating). Is that because it has so little mass? Or is this really not as impressive as it sounds? Can someone with a physics background comment on this?
I've got two of these beasts (as well as one of the older 340M versions) for digital camera use.
In general, they work pretty well. They're a little bit slower than flash memory, and they use more power--but those are really about the only practical differences under normal circumstances.
You can hear the disk spinning (and the head actuator operating) if you listen carefully, but it's by no means loud.
They do demand careful treatment, though. A friend of mine dropped his Microdrive from about waist height onto carpet, and it never worked again.
and I hope they never do: plateau implies that once it's reached, we'll be stuck there for a while.
One note about this hard drive, or any other hard drive for that matter. They might be tough and made for a laptop, but they will not work about 20,000-30,000 feet, confirmed by IBM engineers. We never got a chance to actually flight test one for fear of distruction, but the consensus was it wouldn't make it back anyway.
I could just see myself buying one of these, and, forgetting that it was in my back pocket, sitting on it and breaking it with my fat ass.
The Casio QV4000 4.13 Mega-Pixel Digital Camera is shipped with IBM microdrives for storage.
good enough to steal a large slice of the MP3 player/PDA/Digital Camera pie by simply slashing prices to allow, say, a tiny 1GB MP3 portable for under $250
You did see the headline off of ibm's microdrive site, didn't you? The MP3 player they show has 3 versions:
player + 340 MB Microdrive sells for $299
player + 512 MB Microdrive sells for $349
player + 1000 MB Microdrive sells for $399, the same price as the Apple ipod with a 5000 MB drive.
Still aways away from $250, but getting close.
The biggest surprise is the formfactor of this player. This thing based on the microdrive is BIGGER than the ipod, which is based on a pcmcia-sized form factor 5GB drive! What's the point of a small drive if you stick it in a big case?
edigital: 4.3" x 2.5" x 0.87", 4.9 ounces
ipod: 4.02" x 2.43" x 0.78", 6.5 ounces
The ipod is about an ounce and a half heavier, but holds 5x the data, and has firewire instead of USB. The edigital features voice recognition, but also wastes space with the traditional screen and buttons. Battery life is comparable - 10 hours for the ipod, 12 for the edigital.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Unfortunately, this kind of stupidity isn't confined to the tech world. In online news, even from reputable sources, I see financial people writing "million" where they mean "billion" or "trillion" so often, I've realized, that I've started subconsiously figuring out how many dollars they _must_ have meant, and ignoring the start of words ending with "illion." Ugh, ugh, ugh.
This, _and_ I don't get to watch Maria Bartiromo when I turn off the TV?
I Can't Believe It's A Law Firm, LLP does not necessarily endorse the contents of this message.
One of the best little pieces of technology I own.I bought one almost a year ago for my Canon Powershot G1 camera. Floppies? What are they? I just upload everything i need to take with me onto my camera. :)
dave.
The Frontier Labs Nex II Mp3/WMA player has been out for more than a year and supports IBM Microdrive and CompactFlash. When you plug it in to your computer, it shows up as an external hard drive and you can copy all filetypes onto it, making it useful as a portable hard drive as well. www.frontierlabs.com
-max
--------------------------------------- "No! Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try." -Yoda ------------------------
I beg to differ and again. I've posted these before, and Pendrive even has Linux drivers, just FYI.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
My roomate has one of these for his Canon EOS Digital Camera. Every picture he takes is over 1 meg and yet he still gets a few hundred pictures on it. Its friggen amazing. He did a 2 hour timelaps shot with it and had a 100+ meg picture and it was no big deal. His only current bitch is he hasn't found a firewire adapter for his PC for this because USB is just a bitch for transfering that many files of that size.
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
Because flash cards and other competing storage media this small havent reached the 1GB plateau (yet...)
I stumbled upon an article yesterday which announced a 1GB Flash Memory CF card, but can't find it now. But, a quick
search on google offered me SanDisk announce 1 GB CF Type I that was dated November 5, 2001 and predicted retail availability in Q1 2002 at under $800. Granted, that's a higher price than the IBM MicroDrive, but it also has a much lower power consumption, so battery life would be greatly improved. In addition, the SanDisk offering has no moving parts, so it also has greater shock resistance.
I love my 1GB card. I had a 64mb CF card prior that (and thought it was huge) but now I can store just about anything I want on my PocketPC and not have to worry about running out of room anytime soon.
:)
Nothing like carrying around SimCity 2k, a bunch of MP3s and all the courses to Ziogolf. And those Palm users think that their 8mb machines are the shit. Ha!
My 64mb card is getting good use in my digital camera. It hold like 100+ pictures but it is nothing like having that HD in there.
The only thing that I find as a drawback is the fact that there is no "lip" on the card to pull it out of the slot in the back of the PocketPC. Other than that small drawback it is great.
I suggest that anyone who uses a CF card makes the investment.
"...simply slashing prices to allow, say, a tiny 1GB MP3 portable for under $250."
Or spend ~$150 more and get 4 more gigs and sex in a small package. ^_^ But the only downside to that is if you're a Win* user, you'll have to wait for these guys to finish their product, and hopefully they do soon.
Of course, I'm having trouble myself justifying a $400+ MP3 player when I got my new system (P3/1Ghz, 512mb ram, 40gig hdd, GeForce2, etc) for just $100 more. Hmm..
proton != antielectron
and it's mighty fine. Pop it into my Casio QV-4000 and get over a 1000 shots {:-D} at 1600x1200 with the "Fine" setting on. Then I can immediately eject the card and pop it into my iPAQ using the packaged PC Card adapter and hand the shots around for other people to enjoy.
Power consumption doesn't seem so bad - a little more than the normal CF cards.
Amazingly I dropped my iPAQ with the Microdrive inserted about 4 feet onto a hard floor - the PC card adapter with the drive inside ejected and skidded across the floor. I nearly died but everything is still working fine (knock on wood).
Prices are pretty good if you use pricegrabber or other similar things - picked mine up for less than US $300 at buy.com (long may it live).
A definite recommend if you need a lot of capacity in a small package and don't normally travel with a laptop
Tig
Who cares about 6GB when 1MB Compact Flash cards are due out soon?
I mean...aside from the fact you'd need 6000 of em...
--an unbreakable toy is useful for breaking other toys--
512 meg ddr ram costs 186.99 shipped from crucial..
This stuff also has REALLY high demand, much higher than microdrives. Moore's Law. "Every 18 months the performance will double and the size will half." A gig of this is already here at $950 from kingston. Its only a brief matter of time before this technology is better and faster than the microdrive.
Rob
Hmmm, you sure it was your friend who broke his microdrive?
:-)
Geek toy-breakage being very painful can easily lead to denial
I'm waiting for the day when we look back and marvel at the thought that storage devices actually had moving parts in them at one time. How primitive!
Does anyone have data concerning its vibration resilience? (namely, does it skip while the person holding the player it is integrated in is running?)
Yeh, I think Compaq actually sells the microdrive on their iPAQ webpages. :)
Small expensive things are always bad.
That's exactly how I explained it to my fiancé—she didn't buy it either.
--
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these! You could fit 80GB into the space of a... oh, never mind.
I'm glad to see the improvements that IBM has made to their microdrive. I hope that the advances they make there will trickle down into their much more musically relavant line of laptop hard drives. Archos and Sonic Blue (rio) both use Laptop Hard Drives in their players to very good extent. A laptop drive is already low-powered and slim (though not as slim as the microdrive), but has the added bonuses of being low-cost and sturdy enough for a portable. Laptop hard-drives are more power efficient than the Microdrive, and are about 20 times larger for the same cost (a 20 gig jukebox can be found for roughly the same cost as just the microdrive).
People have proven their willingness to buy CD-based MP3 portables, showing that size isn't everything. The ones that still buy the flash-memory sized drives do so for athletic reasons where durability is a must. The Microdrive fills neither of these niches.
I'm sure the microdrive will find a home in the shirt-pockets of photographers everywhere. However, as a storage medium for mass market music goes, it is overpriced and underperforming.
This Sig is a mnemonic device designed to allow you to recognize this author in the future.
I have a 1 gig microdrive, it came with my camera. Let me tell you, the amount of space is fantastic. I haven't had to delete anything in months. It's almost too much for a digicam.
There is one thing I don't like about it, though; it's much slower than flash memory. I've found it tends to restrain me from shooting quickly. Sometime soon I'll probably get a 256M flash card and move the microdrive into a compatible MP3 player.
They list several that are compatible with the iPAQ on their website.
Of course there is the MicroDrive Which comes in the 340MB or 1GB flavors.
The Kingston DataPak Which holds 260MBor 2GB/5GB storage capacity.
and the Toshiba MK2001MPL a 2GB PCMCIA HDD or the 5GB version
Many of these are cheaper per megabyte than the MicroDrive and will give you much more storage for around the same price. They are supposed to work with any desktop Windows OS (98/ME/2K/XP) and Compaq says they will work with the iPAQ as well.
I bought the Toshiba 5GB and hooked it up to my iPAQ so I could play DivX movies with the Pocket DivX Player from ProjectMayo. I also store a whole bunch of MP3s on it and can transfer the card between my computer and iPAQ for easy file transfers.
These little hard drives are great for anyone who wants portable storage that is large capacity and is pretty easy to use.
But in this case, they're getting bigger *and* smaller.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
From waist high; saw it hit on a corner and take a terrific bunch of bounces. On *tile*. That was a year ago and it's still working great.
Infuriate left and right
...a RAID cluster of these?
What about the (too expensive for now, but perhaps ideal for later) USB Keychain Storage options?
And can realmedia be taken on the go? I've never seen a player that supports *.ra files, but it would be very nice. Honestly, I believe companies ought to begin to create "PORTABLE DIGITAL AUDIO PLAYERS," instead of MP3 players. I'd also like to see the ogg files begin to be supported.
And for those of you who are *one file type zealots*, I'd just like to tell you that your personal opinions are not practical for most folk who would like to use portable audio for more than just music. Websites are beginning to host speeches, sermons, short stories, books and news broadcasts all on archivable digital audio and if someone would like to listen to it on the go, they must have a versitile player. Also, it would be nice to see the audible.com standard be more widely used, because (and this is why i am holding off on buying a portable digital audio player) nobody is putting all of the necessary features into one product!
so if someone's listening out there, i'd like an affordable, small, but large in storage, digital audio player, which will not skip when shook up, will play all of the predominant digital audio file formats (ogg, mp3, ra, wma, audible), (will pref. have modules to expand to other formats) and a easy, thorough interface to the computer which allows good customization of the content, oh yeah and also some sort of rechargable batteries. When that goes on the market, i'll buy two. one for me, and one for my dog.
cheers!
-guy
It truely is amazing how many people quote what they think is Moores Law only to be radically off.
It has to do with TRANSISTERS doubling every 18months. Nothing at all to do with performance, other than as a side effect -- and thats usually a side effect. Sometimes there is no performance boost at all if the transisters are used for compatibility or configurability. Like say Microcode modifications and X86 compatibility layers.
"The observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. In subsequent years, the pace slowed down a bit, but data density has doubled approximately every 18 months, and this is the current definition of Moore's Law, which Moore himself has blessed. Most experts, including Moore himself, expect Moore's Law to hold for at least another two decades."
Rod Taylor
s/TRANSISTERS/transistor density/
Can't believe it. Two mistakes, one word. Talk about dense...
Rod Taylor
Keeping with IBM's tradition of success with their DeskStar line (my 75 gig just failed the other day), I have had three microdrives before finally returning it and purchasing a 320 MB CompactFlash card for $120.
The drive never did actually fail, it only refused to do things like spin up, or would lock up when writing to it. It always seemed to not want to work when I needed it most. And this was for use with a digital camera, handheld, and laptop with CF adapter. I can't imagine using the device for lesiure.
The thing that got me so enraged was the drive would look like it was writing to the disk, then when I would get home from shooting pics or after I copied a huge file there would be only a few random pictures or the filesystem would be corrupt -- not even salvagable.
I'm sure it wasn't my digital camera or any of my other hardware because I tried it in several friends cameras and sure enough it was finicky beyond use. Who knows? Maybe I just got a bad lot -- but I've heard from many others, especially on the digital photography web site that while they would love to use the drive, how can they get it to be reliable? I've never had flash media complain or give me any kind of trouble.
I'd also like to comment on battery usage. Without the MD, I would get about 6-8 hours usage from my iPAQ, however using the drive sparinkly and under normal use that figure drops to around 2-3 hours, 4 tops. Using a CF flash card, I can't even notice a difference (although there probably is one). The microdrive is clearly very demanding of power -- it also heats up *quite* nicely till you can barely hold the device (great for this time of year during the cold though).
Don't even ask about digital cameras. Having to deal with a power-sucking CCD is enough, and when you bring the MD into the picture you have a good *two dozen* shots before the dreaded battery warning. And this is on 1800 mAH NiMH batteries. What's the point in being able to store 700 pictures on one media when you constantly have to switch batteries (assuming you have a few pre-charged sets).
The MD is a great technical feat -- there's no doubt about that. But I would questions its everyday use outside the tradeshow and webzine review for both professionals and lesiure use. I head some of the Delkin MDs are better, but I'm still sure there are some problems. With a 2GB version on the horizon for IBM's model, the microdrive will probably get better. But that begs to ask the real question as to if CF flash media will become cheaper $/MB as the demand is higher and the market is more competitive.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
There's Nex II (http://www.frontierlabs.com/NexII.html) that takes flash cards. Version without any card is $99 -- good if you already have a microdrive.
(Note that they have a pop-up ad, if you're one of those people *really* bothered by them.)
________________________________________________
suwain_2
But the best was from the beginning that you simply insert it into your laptop and just drag all your music directly from your terabyte-server onto the disk, or play the stuff on your laptop when the ipaq ran out of power.
The real write rate I measured is between random 1124 and sequential 1260 kbytes/sec; read was beteen random 960 kbyte and sequential 1260 kybtes/sec, access time about 20 ms; It is much faster than anything I have seen with any USB device; the speed has never felt like a problem.
Other unexpected uses were out-of-the-box file transfer between an PowerBook and Wintel-Notebooks, and you can also store enough pr0n on such a disk without taking away much music capacity. You can also carry around a huge library of e-books without caring much about space.
So far I did not regret the investment, and I haven't seen anyone who wasn't impressed when you handed him the smallest one gigabyte harddisk in the world: it feels heavy and expensive in your hand, and my fingers still slightly sweat when they touch it.
p.
P.S.: It still always surprises me how small it is, and the PCMCIA-Adapter is very IBMish: it hides the connector when you remove the drive, and locks the cover to prevent unintended exposure of the contacts. It also comes with watertight two watertight small boxes with rubber polstered corners to safely stow away the PCMCIA-Adpater and the drive.
Without order, nothing can exist. Without chaos, nothing can be created.
As noted on Steve's website
The following should be noted when using a Microdrive:
SanDisk has has 1GB Compact Flash media for some time now.
"True refinement seeks simplicity."
The thickness of these cards is a major factor since it limits which cameras, pdas, and mp3 players you can buy to use it with. I purchased the 340mb microdrive a year ago and now it's collecting dust since I sold my Canon s20 digital camera in order to get the s110 digital elph wich only supports type 1 cf. Maybe I'll just stick it in a new Cassiopia e200. Man, this stuff just keeps getting more and more expensive!
The microdrive was invented for impatient people like me who didn't want to wait for flash prices to fall...
Quite frankly, measuring the speed of the drive in RPMs is absolutely absurd, especially with a drive of this size. Even though it has less rpms, it doesn't mean a horrible data loss. Let's see...
The microdrive is really small. A rotation for it is a lot less than a rotation for a 3.5 drive.
Because the drive is signifigantly bigger (capacitywise and not dimensionwise as in my 3.2gb 5.25in quantum bigfoot hard drive which weighs about 12 pounds), the sectores are packed more tightly together. The head needs to travel say.... 3 microns (just a random number that divides easily) to read 30megs of data on the 320mb drive. the drive takes 1 second (a gross exxagurated) to travel and write 3 microns at the specified rpm. Since the 1gb drive, which is about 3x as big(capacity) and thus 3x as dense, it needs to travel only 1 micron to read 30mb. Say the rpm speed is 1/3 as much as the 340mb drive. It takes 1 second to travel 1 micron. Thus they are the same. Of course, these numbers are all made up, but the theory is still valid.
There's a lot more to speed then rpm. For all I care, with a lot of time, a screwdriver, some gears, and a large gas-powered engine, you could make the drive go at 600,000 rpms. Granted, it wouldn't work, but it would be still rotating at 600000 rpms. (Note to any crazy overclockers: Don't try this, it won't work and is probably very dangerous)
The microdrive really has nothing to compare itself to. See the comment above on the size of the drive. Besides, CF, SD or SM doesn't rotate. (unless........ never mind (see comment above regarding gasolene engine)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
The drives fail after about a year on average. We are not using udrives in our product because of this. Its great as disposable media, and a great display of technology, but they're not quite ready for prime time.
That point was that an MP3 player had no moving parts which, in turn, meant that:
-There was very long battery life, because most energy in a (walkman/discman) is wasted by the actual mechanical movement of the media.
-You could do (within reasonable limits) whatever you wanted to it without worrying about it skipping, jittering or corrupting.
-The device would be very reliable. (Moving parts are far more likely to break than solid state hardware)
Now, I appreciate the fact that SSDs are many times more expensive, and therefore on a cheap device you can only practically have about 32 - 96 MB of storage (128M at best), but I still feel that the future of MP3 players and the like rely on the industry to develop cheaper Solid State Devices.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
i read somewhere, maybe even here. That solid state memory is going to have a slight paradigm shift. The advent of 3-d solid state memory, where the tiniest compoments (cells/registers/nodes/bits??) are now being stacked upwards as well as sideways. This should increase the potential storage/space of solid memory. I am not sure about how retrieval speed is affected. I am curiouos, is solid state retrieval much faster than moving drives? (in general, per cost....)
-- -- --
Help my mini cause: My journal
Not all digital cameras that claim to take type-II compactflash can handle microdrives. A microdrive generates more heat than does a CF card, and also sucks more power when it spins up. Caveat emptor when doing this-- my Canon G1, for example, handles a microdrive just fine (though Canon says they don't officially support it), but a friend of mine's G1 doesn't; his is a little older than mine.
If you can do PCMCIA, you can get more space for cheaper than the Compact-flash Microdrive. Toshiba makes 5GB type II PCMCIA hard disks now. So if the idea was to turn your iPaq into an iPod, you'd be better off getting the bigger disk.
To the people talking about 20 GB units and such: Take a look some day at the difference in size between the laptop hard disk in a 20GB mp3 player and a Microdrive, or even the iPod's 5GB PCMCIA disk. The size difference is mind boggling.Sure, it's not for all solutions, but it's pretty darned cool for the solutions it is for.
-JDF
Sigh. It's getting to be like that old joke about the Soviet digital watch (from back when digital watches were still cool) - solid, brightly lit, but carrying around the car battery to keep it running took half the fun out of it.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
That's the problem with having too much karma -- You forget to turn off the "give yourself an extra point" on articles that frankly don't deserve it :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It's true, the seek time is better on faster-RPM drives. But fundamentally, for an MP3 player, you don't care, because the throughput of the drive is much much faster than the 128kbps you're playing tunes at - so other than the user interface hit of a less than ten milliseconds the first time you hit the "Play" button and it reads the first track into cache, the drive's got plenty of time to seek before you need to read the next one, and your file system is probably designed to keep most tunes in mostly sequential files anyway.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I still don't get why anyone wants to spend psycho gobs of money for 1 gig of space when 3 bucks on the high end gives you at least 650 megs of rewritable CD.
Drive: 1024 / 250 = 4 megs a buck
CD-RW: 650 / 3 = 216 megs a buck
Am I the only one who gets this?
54 times more bang for the buck here!
I slanted the calcs in the drive's favor!
Someone set us up the bomb, so shine we are!
I don't know what you mean by tiny, but my Archos Jukebox isn't small but fits into any coat pocket, is under $250, and has 6 gigs of space.
A few peope think its "heavy," but relative to what? If you can't handle something a few ounces heavier than your CD case you should probably realize that you've entered the whining geek demographic.
Well they iPod does 1394...
And the 1 GB microdrive is selling for $370.
I suppose Sony will probablly be the next out with a firewire portable HD Based mp3 player, possibly that is compatable with the PS2.
I'm also sure that all the major USB HD MP3 players will be announcing USB 2.0 support in the next model year.
The micro drive is pretty amazing, but I can't see myself buying one.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
A good warning - the microdrives seem to be a bit flakey.
I also have a G1. My microdrive (I've had the 320MB one for 14 months or so - and the 1GB version was available then as well! What is with this "news" story showing up now??) has given me lots of problems. It works very well sometimes, but often it just produces tons of CF card errors.
An important thing to be aware of is that IBM changed the microdrive around November of 2000. They lowered the RPMs but increased the density. Despite lowering the drive's speed, because of the increased density the actual transfer speed was increased slightly, and the drive consumed a bit less power, ran cooler, and seems to have become less prone to errors. My microdrive is the older version and is likely why I've had problems with it.
When the newer version came out, those lucky enough to receive one (around November 2000, you didn't know which one you would get when you bought it - they carried the same part numbers, same boxes; only the physical appearance and markings on the drive itself differed slightly to the outward eye) reported having no problems. I'd bet your friend has an older microdrive like I do, and you have the newer (still more than a year old) kind.
-JF
I've got a pretty good camera (Cannon G1), and since it has a monster battery the power usage of a microdrive isn't a real problem. What I love is how I can squeeze 660+ Full-size max-quality JPEGs (2048 x 1536) on there before I have to do anything about it. I was in London almost 2 weeks, and I thought I took a lot of pictures but I never even came close to filling up the drive. It frees me up from wondering should I keep a shot or not so that I can just shoot everything I see and throw out the crap when I get home. I think it's great.
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
I was stupid enough to buy a Sony made Digicam (damn nice Digicam though). I am stuck with those horribly expensive Sony Digital Memory Sticks!! AARG!!
Heh.
No way you'd fit a HD in those things footprint though. Man are they SMALL! After getting used to them I was shocked at how HUGE regular memory card seem to be.
Still doesn't help much with the fact that the d*mn things are expensive as hell though.
Then again the CIGARET ADAPTOR for the BATTERY for my digicam costs *$90* (!!!)
A new battery only costs $60, heh.
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
A 20G usb hot-swap/PNP drag-n-drop LINUX compatible MP3 player!?!?h tml
:)
look here!
This little puppy has been at http://www.thinkgeek.com for a long time.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/electronics/5784.s
I do admit that I've never used it, but I'm sure if it didn't work, TG would've trashed it long ago.
~BS
I bought one spare and get around 250-300 pictures out of the 2 batteries over a time of 4-6 hours, e.g. at a party with people always wanting to see the last couple of pictures in the display (heavy-duty use).
Without recharging in the meantime, mind you (just so we don't confuse anthing here).
I carry the camera dangling around in my backpack on my bike, or people shake it heavily while they hold it and so far the drive hasn't failed me since. It also worked fine after being chilled to at least -10 degrees (Celsius) while skiing.
Highly recommended, as far as I can say. :-)
Idempotent operation: Like MS software, wether you run it once or often, that doesn't make it any better.
But did you buy it in the end tho? :)
His film cameras must have been the stupid ones that roll the film out as they take pictures.
I'd prefer those cameras that roll the film out first, then roll them back in as you take pictures. This means that shots with pictures in them will be safe in the canister.
Why isn't this more common tho?
Increased capacity is always a good thing in my opinion (160gb on my home box and I still want more). The problem with IBM Microdrives is that they eat batteries faster than your 15-year-old 1st-gen discman. The typical handheld might last a whole day on its charge when using flash memory, but throw in a Microdrive and it will be dead within 2-3 hours.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I was about to buy one of these beasts until I found they have altitude limitations. Can't remember the exact number but I do recall that many of the hikes I go on here in Colorado were above the limit.
I believe the issue is that a disk head floats on an air cushion. If the air gets to thin it will touch the platter.
One should not theorize before one has data. -Sherlock Holmes-