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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. "
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!
When searching through song files we noticed no discernible lag that might be caused by the slower RPMs of the 1GB Microdrive that runs at 3600 RPM, down from the 4500 RPM of the original 340MB drive.
It looks like they might be trying to optimise these fpecifically for MP3 players.
A small cache for the directory so browsing is quick but a low transfer rate for data because playing an MP3 doesn't need fast speeds but does need long battery life.
Mmmmmmm
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
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.
For seek times I can see that RPMs would matter (though the majority of the time for seeking is physically moving the head radially on the disk), however my point is that sure, changing the RPMs for a given density and head count matters, but that comparing RPMs across different densities is comparing based upon partial info. For the sake of example, imagine that on one drive one revolution contains 100KB of data, whereas on another drive it contains 50KB of data, but drive one runs at a slow 5400 RPM versus the "speedy" 7200 RPM of drive two.
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!
the HP Journada 568 i just picked specifically mentions that the CF slot was designed with IBM microdrives in mind. My Olympus E-10 camera as well. sooo... ya.
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
The difference between 5400 and 7200 is primarily a matter of marketting and market stratification than technical capacities.
People pay more for a 7200 consumer drive than a 5400 one. For the extra cost they expect it to potentially have a larger cache and faster seek time than a slower one. As an example, maxtor makes a 100 gig 5400 drive with 2 megs of cache and a 100 gig 7200 drive with 8 megs of cache.
The price to the company isn't that much greater outside of R&D cost. But being able to sell into multiple markets with the like drive mechanizmes makes sense.
Witness the old MFM / RLL days. When a Seagate ST-225 and ST-238R were the exact same drive . One was a 20 meg and the other was a 32 meg. Just different quality control & marketing.
Satsuke
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
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.
Hm, it had a nice picture of a 1.0GB compact flash, but on the list of available products, it only listed up to 512MB.
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."
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