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Microdrive Technology Rebounds Thanks to iPod Mini
An anonymous reader writes "A few years ago Richard Menta over at MP3 Newswire did a lengthy review on the IBM Microdrive and declared it would significantly alter the MP3 portable market if IBM did one thing - drop the price. That never happened and it prompted Menta last year to declare the iPod's more cost effective Toshiba drive made it moot and he put the Microdrive on his 2002 MP3 loser list. Since then the drive technology was acquired by Hitachi who convinced to Apple to use it for the iPod Mini. The Mini's recent success prompted Menta to revisit his previous write-off. Interesting view of the up and down travils of any technology and how each change can have dramatic effect on its success and failure."
I just bought a 4 GB Microdrive on eBay for $299, before running across this article that explains how to get a 4 GB Microdrive for $50 less than the going eBay price by buying and taking apart an iPod Mini.
Apparently all of the 4 GB Microdrives on eBay were obtained precisely this way.... which may explain why the iPod Mini has sold out everywhere despite being a relatively-bad deal compared to the 15 GB model. Hitachi is clearly selling these drives to Apple at or near a loss, for whatever strange reason.
to become an overnight success.
Hitachi is probably profiting nicely from this.. It's too bad they don't have CFlash cards that are big and cheap yet, seems that's far down the road.
mix_master_mike
vafrous
I declared Gopher dead as a result of the web in 1994, and Gopher has since has an incredible rebirth and is now in common use again.
Text in italics may not have actually happened.
Hrmm... this got me thinking... Is it possible to replace the 4gb iPod Mini HD with one of those new 8gb CF cards?
Does anybody know if these smaller microdrive based mp3 players are less prone to damage due to physical shock versus an ipod or nomad zen like device?
Is it: ..was acquired by Hitachi who convinced Apple to use it for the iPod Mini.
or
was acquired by Hitachi who was convinced by Apple to use it for the iPod Mini.
Editors should be clearing this up, rather than adding 11 more submissions to the 'Games' catagory. C'mon Timothy - stop playing UT2004 for just a second.
I'm always wondering if these drives can experience crashing or data corruption if it gets hit hard while it's running? Is it really a spinning hard drive or is it something else?
MicroDrive won't be successful as a storage because nobody really needs to carry that much data around. When iPod comes in, it changed the use of such device, and people do have needs to carry that much of music around.
Similar to Acer's latest monsterous laptop, which is so heavy and short of battery life. Most people said it is too heavy and short-life to be carried around, but in reality this laptop is not designed for you to carry around and use it in pubs, cafe or buses, instead it is for people to move from point A to point B, and station it on a desk again. This immediately changes its intended use and market.
Well I'm sure the RIAA will love the self-destructive nature of those drives
With all this high storage for MP3s, why don't PDAs come with built-in 5 or 10GB?
Yes battery life suffers, but we already have colour screens and fast processors - the days of plugging in the palm every month or so are gone, and many users are used to recharging on a daily basis.
It would be nice to fill the PDA with work docs, technical docs, encyclopaedias, useful apps, and a complete backup image - not to mention all the music!
The iPod also attempts to cache the next and previous songs if enough RAM exsists. If you hit the next song button really quickly you can hear the hard drive spin up and locate the song.
Anyone remember the Sinclair Microdrive?
Sir Clive Sinclair, inventor of the ZX81 and Spectrum line of computers did not believe disc drives had a future. He invented the microdrive. Cheap, fast and with low power demands.
The microdrive had small cartridges with a tape loop running inside. The Spectrum version held ~100 k or so of data. They were built into the Sinclair Ql, and was available as periphals for Spectrum (Timex in the US).
It was very soon forgotten except by us old Spectrum afficionados!
I wonder what folks will do with all the left over iPod minis and MuVo2s after they pull the drives for storage.
any ideas?
From the press release:
"IBM had access to the SysV source code. IBM also developed the MicroDrive. Therefore, the MicroDrive is obviously a derivative product, and we believe that all iPod Mini owners now owe us $699."
So, anyway, I don't have the URL handy, but the word is that once you reformat those things they work correctly; it wuold obviously not be cost-effective for Apple to bump production costs by insisting that Hitachi munge their firmware, or to waste development time and money doing it themselves.
Mike Hoye
In this day and age, where computers are so widely used, and our data integrity is vital, we still rely on data storage methods that use moving parts. Nothing lasts forever, but magnetic media always has a nasty habit of failing much sooner, mainly because it still relies on a system vulnerable to friction. Now microdrive technology is rebounding? When is this dinosaur going to die!? Then again, maybe that's the reason it's still around. If it didn't fail, we wouldn't have to buy a new one.
The ones out of the Ipod Mini have a very large barcode and so far there has not been a single documented case of that microdrive working in any digital camera anywhere.
If you can provide a link to instructions on how to get the ipod mini's microdrive to work in other devices, you will be my new best friend!
"[N]obody really needs to carry that much data around. ... people do have needs to carry that much of music around."
Once they're bits, they're bits. Music (as a file) is data, same as a quarterly report or a recipe in ASCII.
It's good to see the music storage market pushing down the cost of micro-hard drives, though!
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Scores of people, however are putting in a smaller CF card or older microdrive in the Muvo^2. This is generally a digital photographer who has a bunch of these cards anyway, and with a 4gb one, their old 256 lexar or 340 ibm microdrive can be spared.
So, for $199 people are getting a 340mb muvo2 and a 4gb microdrive. Much less than the cost of a 4gb microdrive retail (~$500)
Perhaps the reason Microdrives fell out of favor wasn't just the price point. With the exception of raw data transfer speed, solid state Flash memory is superior in every way. Portable devices are battery constrained, subjected to extraordinarily rough treatment and great temperature extremes. Flash memory is many times better than MicroDrive in all those critical areas.
Finally, Microdrives are fading away because flash memory capacities have been increasing as their cost decreases (in addition to the hardware advantages). All we are seeing here with the iPod Microdrives is a temporary reduction in cost-per-byte over flash memory. This artificial bubble will not last, and flash memory will (continue to) dominate in the long run.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
So did I after pumping napalm in the tunnels in my back yard.... killing all life in my yard, but alas! the gopher came back!
dammit!
I recently purchased a Muvo NX instead of the Ipod Mini because I needed something for working out and was concerned that all the shaking would affect the life of the hard drive. Is there any info on this?
I don't have the figures to hand, but I'm sure someone will correct me ...
... now that's a lot of saving new music files! However hard disks can be rewritten millions of times, which is really good for things like FAT tables, windows swap files etc.
... ... just a pondering, no real point!
I believe that Flash memory can be rewritten 100k times before failure
For things like music, photographs etc. Flash is a much better technology, just a fair bit more expensive than hard disks (at the moment). But for computer storage and in particular swap file space, flash could fail (in particular memory locations) faster than an iPod battery! Of course this may be bypassed by some sort of checksum/bad sector system or a usage balance across flash so that the swap file doesn't use the same physical memory address for long before moving onto another area of memory
Yes, now I see what you mean. It takes a worthwhile, desired product to make the cool component inside make more sense.
... ah, well.)
I'm glad to see 1GB CF cards coming down drastically in price lately. What sucks is the "gotta have a CF card today" example I bought at a Ritz photo store several months ago - a 96 and a 64 meg card together for something well over $100. Ah, well, a hole I got myself into -- to think I was paying more than half of the cost of a 4GB CF drive (in the form of the 4GB nomad
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
I'm post this AC since it's OT and don't want to lose karma.
It has overtaken Linux as the number one topic. Give it a rest.
Slashdot isn't a Linux site, nor does it claim to be. Google Linux news, you wont find slashdot near the top of the list.Even cowboy, an editor for slashdot, is a mac fan; check out his web site. This site is about "news for nerds, stuff that matters", which covers just about anything. Most nerds don't even come here anymore, it's sort of the "Popular Science" of technical/scientific publications. When a topic is technical, you'll find that most comments are either off-topic or attempts at one-liner jokes. A lot of the slashdot crowd really don't have many real world technical skills, many of them are just college kids having fun. Q: Why does slashdot feature Apple products so often? A: Apple products do not appeal to the DIY/"under-the-hood" crowd. With Apple, you can buy your nerd status w/o all of the technical mumbo-jumbo.
come on, hard drives is a moving target as well. Their density grows fairly rapidly. What do you think? CF capacity will go up and price will go down, but hard drive will remain as it is now. Rather silly thought, I would say. Expect the price difference be in the range something like 1:10 (hard drive to CF) *not* on a temporary basis, but well into the future. By the time we can get 8GB CF for $1,000, there will be 8GB microdrive for $100. Capiche?
We've been putting microdrives in the compact flash slot of our mini-itx motherboards. They are $49 for 340 Mb, perfect for embedded applications, such as POS, for instance, and can hold several years of data.
"Hitachi is clearly selling these drives to Apple at or near a loss"
Assumption without facts.
Perhaps when you agree to buy a million, Hitachi gives you a price break.
Just a guess.
He's refering to the fact that if you wanted to buy a 4 Gig Microdrive at a retail store, that it will cost you 400$.
All figues from office max...
.62
.21.
.19.
Even without rebates, the cds stay the cheapest and the usb drive, while slightly more than the floppies, retains its edge over them with portability, speed, and ease of use.Lexar 64MB CF Card, $39.98, $/Mb = $
50 pack of floppies, $14.98, $/Mb = $
Lexar 256mb USB "Jump Drive", $49.98 after rebate, $/Mb = $
50 Spindle 48x CD-R, Free after rebate, $/Mb = $0.00.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
>*Apples are expensive
Not if you buy them in bulk!!
hate titty pee colon slash slash
You might want to return the MuVo while you can (or sell it on eBay for a profit - people really want those cheap MuVo microdrives).
The reason why the HD in an iPod is of no concern while working out (or anything else) is that the iPod caches quite a bit - only reading the HD a little bit here or there. I have had my iPod (old 5GB model) on the floor of my car driving over twnety miles of washboard dirt road without a hiccup.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
All of these would demand that the battery life on most PDAs improves greatly (I know my Tungsten T2 can't handle the strain when I do things like this for very long). That said, none of them seem at all original, most are already implemented, and I'm amazed nobody seems to have thought how much greater these would be on a device with a MicroDrive.
Movies - great for anyone who spends a lot of time on buses, trains, and airplanes
Music - Screw PDA cellphones, PDA game systems, and the like. Make a really good PDA/MP3 player. Save me the trouble of having to carry both my Palm and my iPod around everywhere I go. Along the same vein, audiobooks would be nice.
Data transfer - That PDA could double as a FlashDrive type thing with much more storage space. Granted, my Palm should do the same thing but apparently PalmOne is too tunnel-visioned to think how useful it would be to make their devices double as SD card readers.
You know, not only are you off topic but you are incorrect as well. Choose mcpu or march, but not both please.
I am feeling fat and sassy
This is really getting down to the fundamental conflict of solid state storage memory vs. magnetic storage.
When I was a teenager, I had an Apple ][ with a blank memory expansion board that I loaded up every few months - as finances allowed - with 16K RAM chips from the local electronics store. I did this until I got to a total of 1 MB. (Now that must have been 1 MB - 640 K more than enough for anyone ;)
I used it mostly as a ramdisk loaded with ProDOS and many of my programs (after all, a 5 1/4" floppy only stored 140 K in those days and many programs fitted on floppy, so 1 MB was like the capacity of an early hard drive).
It booted in no time flat and programs were instantly available, provided of course the memory board was kept powered.
Ever since, I've dreamed of using a solid state hard drive for all my successively more powerful machines. However, although solid state media has got cheaper at a steady rate, magnetic media has also continued to get cheaper, and at a greater rate.
Software and our uses for it has evolved to need more and more storage, so the dream has never returned to reality.
I am running my iPAQ with a 512 MB Ultra CF card, which in a sense reminds me of my Apple ][ over 20 years ago. But even for it I'm mighty tempted to pull apart an iPod mini to scavenge its Microdrive!
My gut instinct suspects magnetic media will still be outpacing solid state for a while to come, even for portable devices.
If you can make a $300 PDA with, say, 512MB of storage for music (or whatever), it seems it'd sell like hotcakes. I know I'd gladly buy one.
An iPAQ H2210 costs around $300-$350. It is pretty good (400 MHz XScale chip, 16,000 color display, etc) and has both SD and CF memory expansion slots.
Add a 512 MB CF card for around $100 and there's your high capacity PDA.
I have one and it works well, battery life is good. Of course, I'd like to put a 4 GB Microdrive in it. ;)
Check it out
This reminds me of USB. Intel tried hard to push it but it just didn't catch on. Then Apple forced Mac users to switch to it with the iMac, and bickety-bam, thank you ma'am, USB jumped into the mainstream. Now you can't buy a PC without it.
the JoshMeister on Security
I had just heard about the MuVo in conjunction with the 4GB card, and didn't realize there were multiple models - thanks for clearing that up.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I can't wait until the class action lawsuits are filed.. the click-whirr of death from legions of iPod minis!
Hitachi has inherited an evil, evil legacy.
Man, that's such rubbish. USB support on PCs was practically non-existant until the release of Windows 98 (there was a Windows 95 with USB Support version, but it was only shipped a few months before Windows 98 itself, and even then it wasn't in any way as popular as "vanilla" Windows 95).
Until USB was supported by mainstream OSes, there was very little point in PC motherboard manufacturers adding USB ports to their designs. Prior to Windows 98 being released, few mobo models had USB ports. After Windows 98 was released, almost every new mobo model had USB ports on board.
The myth that it was Apple that brought USB into the mainstream is just that: a myth. Yes, Apple was the first to ship USB-equipped computers but to suggest that a few hundred thousand iMacs and G3s, rather than millions of USB-equipped Windows 98 PCs, were responsible for the plethora of USB first generation of USB devices is laughable.
This isn't a "PC is better than Mac" flame, only an attempt to bring a degree of truth to the parent poster's misconception that Apple is able to dictate which hardware standards the rest of the industry adopts. If that were at all true, we'd all be using SCSI drives for storage,Appletalk for networking, single button mice, floppy drives without eject buttons, etc.
Please, get your facts straight in future.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Microdrive is cheaper and in some cases faster. Also, having done some calculations for an mp3 player, I can tell you that MicroDrive is at least as power efficient if you use it very wisely. The reason for this is that the power usage of flash is actually rather high, given that due to its lower transfer rates, you have to have it turned on for longer.
I do agree Flash has some great advantages, but Microdrive has some advantages that Flash won't catch up with soon. If you ask me, there's room for both in the marketplace.
> (IIRC, the original iMac moved certain things that used to load off disk at bootup to the ROMs...)
I'm pretty sure you've got that turned around. The iMac less on ROM (again, if I remember correctly; I could be wrong) than previous Macs. The Toolbox ROM was moved to a file called Mac OS ROM on the hard disk, in the System Folder.
> One very old Mac model even had a whole (albeit stripped-down) version of the Mac OS in its ROM, and could be booted from it, without a disk.
The Mac Classic. That ROM trick was a beautiful thing. Imagine if you could boot a modern PC into a basic GUI mode from the freaking ROM without any working boot disk or anything. That would be awesome.
Um, why would Apple have to convince their prospective supplier?! Apple is the customer here. They made the decision to use the Hitachi drive. What would Hitachi say, "No, we will not sell you 100000 Microdrives"?!
So if anyone did convincing, obviously that would be Hitachi, as it says in the story. The extraneous "to" was obviously a typo and it does not even remotely indicate that the intention was the complete freaking opposite. Any fool can deduce that on his own, so what are you talking about, and how the f**k did this get a +4 insightful??
Think before you post. Think again before you mod.
Da Blog
Okay, I see your point. Sorry for branding your question as stupid. I just didn't see where you were going with the supplier having to be convinced to sell their product, but you were thinking of the pricing negotiations.
/. is that margins on the actual bare microdrives are super thick, and Hitachi was glad to throw Apple a bunch for well below retail. Seeing as how that's a lot of microdrives. I'm sure Apple shared their market research with Hitachi and said, "Look, we'll eat our hats if we don't sell about 100,000 units of these babies just in pre-orders. You want in on this action?"
Word on