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IBM 1GB Microdrive Review
Posted by
Hemos
on Sun Jan 06, 2002 02:05 PM
from the mucho-space dept.
from the mucho-space dept.
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. "
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Hrm... (Score:1)
Hmm... (Score:2, Redundant)
($369 for a 1Gig drive is not exactly what I call a new MP3 jukebox in the making)
Hmm... (Score:1, Interesting)
Portable Movie Player potential? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd buy one.
its still a hard drive (Score:2, Insightful)
Humm... (Score:1)
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.
Small expensive things are always bad (Re:Humm...) (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Protein/3-D Memory Modules (Score:1)
Wonder if you have to feed the things or flush out the waste on a regular basis...
Ken
Of RPMs and Throughput (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
$250 for 1GB isn't cheap (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
dumb errors (Score:2, Informative)
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...
Shock specifications! (Score:1)
Re:Shock specifications! (Score:4, Informative)
As someone who may have done shock tests for a "small" company, I can tell you that is a bit misleading.
The shock rating typically is determined by placing a drive on an apparatus that drops the drive from a height onto a platform with a controlled shock response (how much it gives, the exact spring constant to give you a certain duration of a pulse). This distance IIRC (say for 800G at 2ms pulse width), is approximately 7ft. This pulse is idealized as a sinusoid with a maximum around the target shock (in this example, 800G).
1500G would be more, but not like firing it out of a gun at a brick. 15000m/s/s is a quick change in velocity. But a little mathematics would show that it isn't inconceivable for a quick stop from a relatively low speed.
I'm sure someone doing some karma enterprising could find some links to companies that develop industrial packaging testing equipment.
They work well but are pretty fragile (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:They work well but are pretty fragile (Score:5, Interesting)
On the other hand Bill Biggart (the only PJ to be killed wile covering the towers collapse) had one in his digital camera. It survived, he didn't, nor did the film in either of his film cameras (the backs burst open). So while his ~30 rolls of film taken earlier were good his last surviving pictures were on the 1G microdrive.
There is a picture of the remains of his camera (on a stark white background) on the cover of the current American Photo magazine. It includes some pretty stunning interviews of a half dozen or so pros that were covering the event.
It is pretty amazing to read how they were "operating on automatic", and "could barely see the viewfinder through the tears", and look at the same time at the amazingly well framed photos (like James Nachtwey's shot for Time with the building coming down in the background framed against the top of a church and it's cross on page 20).
A geek should own it just for the machine beat to death on the cover.
A photo geek should own it for the interviews and pictures.
Everyone who reads news papers should own it to see how the people that get their pictures risk their lives sometimes for them.
I can't find the Am Photo cover online, but doing a google search for "Bill Biggart American Photo" does turn up a whole bunch of relevant articles (including a surprisingly good MSNBC one).
Re:They work well but are pretty fragile (Score:4, Interesting)
Ah, found it [dpreview.com], as an added bonus if you read the rest of the thread you get to see me be beaten up for not knowing the difference between a PCB in the camera and one in the lens.
Uses for microhard drive (Score:1)
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.
busted microdrive (Score:1)
Casio digicam is shipped with these (Score:2, Insightful)
MP3 player -- IPOD is smaller!! (Score:5, Informative)
You did see the headline off of ibm's microdrive site, didn't you? The MP3 player [edigital-store.com] 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.
It's a nice little drive. (Score:1)
1 GB MP3 portable (Score:1)
-max
What, no 1G Flash? (Score:5, Insightful)
I beg to differ [sandisk.com] and again. [pendrive.com] I've posted these before, and Pendrive even has Linux drivers, just FYI.
Digital Camera usage (Score:2, Interesting)
1GB MicroDrive alternative exists (Score:5, Informative)
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 [google.com] on google [google.com] offered me SanDisk announce 1 GB CF Type I [dpreview.com] 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.
my 1GB CF card. (Score:2)
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.
Or I could get... (Score:1)
Or spend ~$150 more and get 4 more gigs and sex in a small package [apple.com]. ^_^ But the only downside to that is if you're a Win* user, you'll have to wait for these guys [mediafour.com] 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..
I've got one.... (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Holding off (Score:1)
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...
Other types of memory (Score:2, Insightful)
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
Impressive, but still primitive... (Score:2)
Vibration Stability? (Score:1)
Does anyone have data concerning its vibration resilience? (namely, does it skip while the person holding the player it is integrated in is running?)
Good Drives for MP3 Players (Score:1)
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.
I've got one... (Score:2)
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.
Alternatives (Score:3, Informative)
They list several that are compatible with the iPAQ on their website.
Of course there is the MicroDrive [ibm.com] Which comes in the 340MB or 1GB flavors.
The Kingston DataPak [kingston.com] Which holds 260MB [kingston.com]or 2GB/5GB [kingston.com] storage capacity.
and the Toshiba MK2001MPL [toshiba.com] a 2GB PCMCIA HDD or the 5GB version [toshiba.com]
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.
USB KeyDrives and RealMedia on the Go (Score:1, Interesting)
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
Never worked right (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
5 GB MicroDrive (Score:1)
(Note that they have a pop-up ad, if you're one of those people *really* bothered by them.)
Using it for a year with an ipaq... (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Disadvantages compared with flashmedia (Score:1)
As noted on Steve's [steves-digicams.com]website
The following should be noted when using a Microdrive:
SanDisk already beat IBM to the chase. (Score:1, Informative)
overpriced compared to faster, thinner flash (Score:1)
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...
rpm... bologna! (Score:1)
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)
No mention of MTBF in that review. (Score:2)
MP3 players. (Score:1)
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.
Solid state WILL make it (Score:1)
A couple interesting things about Microdrives... (Score:3, Informative)
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
I'm sorry... (Score:1)
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!
tiny 1GB MP3 portable for under $250? (Score:2)
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.
They're killer in DigiCams (Score:2, Interesting)
Why mess w/1Gig when you can play w/20! :) (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Nice, but there are other problems (Score:2, Informative)
Altitude (Score:2, Informative)
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.
Re:does it support FreeBSD? (Score:1)
Re:yawn. (Score:2)
But in this case, they're getting bigger *and* smaller.