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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."
Actually they were taking the hard drives out of the Muvo2 not the ipod mini.
because its not mini? plus you might also get better battery life too.
Except that it is being reported that Apple has had the firmware in the microdrive changed so that you CAN'T use it as a standard compact-flash type drive.
If you want to do that... stick with the MuVo2.
The seller more likely obtained it from a Creative MuVo, as the Hitachi drive in the iPod is missing some aspect of the standard IDE controller used in most CompactFlash cards and drives.
Mostly Digital Cameras. Trying to buy a 4GB CF card for your digital camera will run you close to $800, I believe.
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.
Professional photographers tend to use either:
;-)
512MB Lexar CFs, or
1GB MicroDrives.
(Or film.
Larger flash cards offer drastically diminishing return, making it harder to carry around ten or twenty of them.
MicroDrive users tend to be either desperate for storage or more careful with their cameras (as they aren't as shock-proof). (You won't see many pho/journs with a MicroDrive.)
For the existing MicroDrive users, this 4GB "hack" is a huge boon - given that many current cameras write 10-20MB photographs (in RAW format), the ability to take more than fifty photos between card changes is a bit of a nicety. This likely won't impact current flash card users, though, as the 4GBs are just as damage-prone as the 1GBs.
Safer than a desktop HDD. The tiny platters don't move quite as much when jolted (edges of the platter being much closer to the axis than with desktop drives), and they tend to spin down a lot more frequently than desktop drives. Still not as "safe" as a regular ol' flash card...
Having said that, I don't think it's like the Acer luggable. For one thing, the IBM Microdrive took something that was already successful - smaller (2.5") hard drives, and made them a LOT smaller. For another, it sounds like the infamous (if fake) "640K ought to be enough for anybody" comment. Now, admitadly, flash storage is better than anything with moving parts for a bunch of reasons. But saying that there weren't uses at that time for that much data just isn't true - digital cameras were one emerging market, sub-sublaptops were another, and I tihkn that something LIKE the iPod (basically, using it as an MP3 player, not necessarily as slick as a real iPod) is more of a natural use of the technology than something that incidentally "happened."
It takes a long time from the invention of a technology to the time that it becomes widely used or practical - its a learning curve. That's why there are all sorts of web-based services around now that all the technical foundations were there for in 1998 - because once the tools are available, it takes some time for inventors and idea people to realize it and understand how to best use them.
I think that if the microdrives can stay bigger (in storage space) than compact flash at a similar price point, which I thikn they will over the next 5 years, you'll start seeing more and more of them.
I know someone who used a 1 gig microdrive as storage for their Toshiba PocketPC. Reduced the battery life by 50% if you used the disc much, and it got very hot. The big storage capacity was nice, but it wasn't a very effective tradeoff. Bigger CF cards are probably a better solution for most people unless the 4+ gig drives use a lot less power.
" ... Apple at or near a loss, for whatever strange reason. ..."
Hitachi is making money off the drives they sell to Apple, in the quantities Apple is buying. It's called manufacturing.
The "part" you bought cost more in single, packaged, retail distribution channels just like any other part does; it's called retail.
Wanna buy a new car? Buy it in single parts, forget about the labour (we'll assume it's free) and you will have spent who-knows how many times more than a showroom example when you're done.
Want to manufacture cars? Buy it in quantity parts, factor in the labor, and it will still be cheaper than your one-off.
The wholesaler's markup on parts (let alone the retail markup) is about the same as a new car dealer's gross markup. Apple isn't even paying a wholesaler, but you did.
Unlike the original iPod (where Hitachi gave Apple a 1-year exclusive to the 5GB & later larger HDs, from spring 2001 to spring 2002, so that other manufacturers couldn't buy it initially and all prices were lower 1 year later than Apple paid at first in quantity) you can actually buy a 4GB drive retail; pretty much simultaneously with the introduction of the iPod mini.
So, instead of Apple paying down the cost to ramp up production by itself, like it did with the original iPod's drive, you just paid for some of it. By the way, thanks from all of us.
Technical analysis of the original iPod (reports cost thousands, I saw them at work) reveal Apple is pricing the iPod twice as low as normal manufacturing practice in electronics (parts cost is just over 50% of retail, compared to the 20~25% typical in consumer electronics); perhaps you're just a victim of Apple pricing lower than the norm in the industry. (I know it sounds crazy, but that's what the data reveals).
-1, Blatantly Incorrect
s/iPod Mini/Creative Labs MuVo^2/g -- to get the correct version of the parent comment.
iPod Minis contain a different version of the Hitachi 4GB Microdrive. In the iPod Mini, the ability for the card to do CF+ has been disabled, it operates only in IDE mode -- making it useless for digital cameras and most other things one would want a Microdrive for. The MuVo has the standard consumer model of the Microdrive with working CF+ support. It has been tested to work properly in the Canon EOS 300D (Digital Rebel) among other cameras.
You can see whether a drive is from the MuVo or the iPod Mini because the iPod Mini version is barcoded and serial numbered on the label, while the MuVo version is just an empty white label.
More info here.
Random and weird software I've written.
Entering "microdrive 4gb" in eBay gets me 64 hits. Apple announced that it has over 100,000 pre-orders for the iPod Mini. Even if every single one of those was stripped from an iPod Mini (not likely) and Apple only produced enough to fulfill pre-orders (not likely), that would account for 0.06% of its sales.
Please just accept that your criteria for what makes a good deal may not be shared by... hundreds of thousands of other people.
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!
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)
the days of plugging in the palm every month or so are gone, and many users are used to recharging on a daily basis.
Funny, I have a Palm Zire (nice bright color display) that I use heavily on a daily basis, with sounds and such turned on. I also make use of the built-in camera once in a while when I'm in a pinch. I only have to charge it once every month or so, sometimes once every two months if my usage is not very heavy for a while. So what's this about recharging on a daily basis again?
"Wow, you're like some kind of superhero able to ward off happiness and success at every turn."
-- Ryan Stiles
Although I certainly can't claim to be a pro just yet, I've cycled 14,000 pictures through one 256MB Lexar 12x without any loss in capacity (disk images are the same size as images made the day after it was purchased) and without any obvious data corruption. You're certainly correct that it WILL wear out eventually... but when it does, I'm out $80 rather than $250.
The other day I was showing off my new ipod mini in the parking lot. It was turned off and locked. I missed slipping it back into the sleeve of my powerbook case and the ipod crashed onto the pavement and took a nasty tumble. The blue case suffered one ding, but otherwise externally it was ok.
/dev/null. I found no errors. Thankfully.
In the car, I turned the ipod mini on the check to see if it was still alive. Instead of the normal ipod menu, I got the apple logo... it flashed... after a couple of minutes the normal ipod menu appears. I was concerned that I had damaged my brand new ipod mini.
In the car, I played a couple of songs, and all was ok. When I got home I plugged it into my powerbook and did a global copy of every file to
William
---- perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(
If you really want to test the entire drive, use 'dd' to copy it sector-by-sector. Or, if MacOS X implements the Unix 'badblocks' utility, that'll do it...
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
Not quite. Apple developed its own special monitor connector to reduce cable clutter, reflecting its obsession with elegant design - the display gets not only video but also a USB signal and power through the same cable, instead of the three cables it used to take. Apple didn't begin offering its adapter until long after it started using this connector (ADC), and in fact a third party company, Dr. Bott, offered its own DVI->ADC adapter much earlier than Apple did (Apple even sold Dr. Bott's adapter at its store, and would even include it in custom computer configurations). It has also been suggested that ADC was a way to lock people who buy Macs into buying Apple displays to go with them, which isn't true; every Mac with a video card with an ADC output has also had a more conventional output (either VGA or DVI, and the ones with ADC and DVI came with a DVI->VGA adapter so one can use any old regular monitor).
As far as the ROMs go, they do serve some purpose besides simply locking the Mac OS to Apple hardware. Certain OS elements are kept in the ROMs (IIRC, the original iMac moved certain things that used to load off disk at bootup to the ROMs, and cut the startup time as a result). 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.