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. "

Comments

its still a hard drive

[mkmiller]

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.

Of RPMs and Throughput

[ergo98]

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?

Casio digicam is shipped with these

[RoyalTS]

The Casio QV4000 4.13 Mega-Pixel Digital Camera is shipped with IBM microdrives for storage.

What, no 1G Flash?

[ackthpt]

Because flash cards and other competing storage media this small havent reached the 1GB plateau (yet)

I beg to differ and again. I've posted these before, and Pendrive even has Linux drivers, just FYI.

Other types of memory

[RobPiano]

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

Never worked right

[hyrdra]

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.