Microdrive, the forgotten media

[Ninjinsky]

Looking for a CF card for my excellent little Canon S50 camera I came across a 'microdrive'. Never even heard of them before. Seriously cute miniature one inch hard drives up to 12 gb.
Eclipsed a decade ago I am never the less impressed by how far mechanical miniaturization got


pic credit: steve's digicams
http://www.steves-digicams.com/acces...e-devices.html


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdrive

[Snake]

Wow! 16 gb was a lot of storage back then for something that small.

[Z1R rider]

I've got a Fuji camera that uses Micro drives and CF cards (up to 1 gig), when I got the camera a 1 g micro drive cost as much as the camera, in the $650 range. It also uses Smart cards, 128 megs is as big as they come and in the day (circa 02-05) they were around $80, I don't think they can be bought new anymore.

By the way, I still use the camera, amazingly good pics for only 3 megapixel.

[Alex]

Flash has just about eclipsed spinning disk in the past year or so, even at the mega-capacity level in the data center market. We're putting as much storage capacity into one rack as we currently have stored in 150-200 racks elsewhere.

[corksil]

It's amazing what kind of technology emerges and is instantly eclipsed by something else.

However, I do understand there to be certain electrical circuitry which has simply reached the pinnacle of perfection in it's design. Car audio amplifiers for example. Every single day of my life, I'm using the same car audio amps that I purchased over two decades ago. I've had to replace a rotary switch on one due to a fire extinguisher going off in the truck while driving. That stuff is terribly corrosive.

Flashlight technology has also been highly perfected. Due to innovations with semi conductors, the lights keep getting brighter with each new model released, but I have old school LED flashlights from a reputable american company which are brighter than 90% of the LED lights on the market today and I bought them years ago and they see constant daily use. I've run them over with numerous full size trucks, excavators, and other heavy equipment and they simply do not quit. At one point I was playing fetch with a really large dog in an asphalt parking lot and repeatedly throwing the light as far as I could across the lot for the dog to go retrieve. The major selling point for me back when I bought them was a customer review by an independent military contractor. He used them in afganistan on IED deactivating or detonating robots. The guy said he was averaging ten point blank IED detonations per flashlight before failure with the light affixed to the camera of the robot. He would find some of the lights 60-70 feet away from the blast crater from the explosion [still brightly illuminated] and not a discernible piece of anything else within 50 feet from the blast site.

off topic

[JohnnyBravo]

^thats a good light!

[VaFish]

I had a digital camera that used a Microdrive. But I think it was in the couple hundred meg range, not gig.

[CynicalC]

I get the 'if it ain't broke' mentality, but you can probably find a used newer PowerShot for the same price as the CF cards you're trying to get for that antique.

[Rifleman]

I'll show how old I am, anyone remember

Zip drives

and Firewire

100 mb removable disk and Firewire was supposed to be huge data transfer rates...


now we have gigabyte thumb drives and USB2.0

dang I'm old, I learned on a 12 inch floppy drive machine, thought the 3.5 inch disks were the bomb

[Ninjinsky]

Originally Posted by Rifleman

I'll show how old I am, anyone remember

Zip drives

and Firewire

100 mb removable disk and Firewire was supposed to be huge data transfer rates...


now we have gigabyte thumb drives and USB2.0

dang I'm old, I learned on a 12 inch floppy drive machine, thought the 3.5 inch disks were the bomb

I remember our lab got a minc11 (or pdp11) used those huge floppies.




I just pulled my zip drive and a stack of disks from storage, thereby hangs a tale. I had a huge row with the board over that. Advising them to hold fire on moving to ZIP across the corp. I had read in tech journals that writable CDs were imminent, I was overruled. It was a Dilbert moment
I don't know how many tens (or probably hundreds of thousands) they wasted on zip drives across the organisation that were in the bin within 2 years.
I had, thankfully, been more successful fending off floptical drives which deep sixed faster than deely bobbers

[Bob2010]

Ah reminds me when burning cds was a thing. I had a mini disc player. USB cable from my pc to the player, it syncs and makes mixtapes. Re do as many times as you want. It was smaller then a Walkman but loaded like a cassette tape.
Was the **** in 1999- 2002 until I graduated and didn't use it anymore. I think I was the only one in HS to rock one. This was the missing link between the cd and the iPod. iPods took over shortly after

[Ninjinsky]

Originally Posted by Bob2010

Ah reminds me when burning cds was a thing. I had a mini disc player. USB cable from my pc to the player, it syncs and makes mixtapes. Re do as many times as you want. It was smaller then a Walkman but loaded like a cassette tape.
Was the **** in 1999- 2002 until I graduated and didn't use it anymore. I think I was the only one in HS to rock one. This was the missing link between the cd and the iPod. iPods took over shortly after

Thanks Bob, I still use a racked Tascam MD-350 minidisc player/ recorder and a Sony s2 minidisc walkman. They are excellent quality, clarity, listening side by side better than CD in my opinion, though of course historic now.

(I also still have an ancient "Realistic TR-901 8-track" player/recorder from the era when your in car options were basically Johnny Mathis or Glen Campbell unless you recorded your own cartridges )

[InvisiBill]

The older iPods used those MicroDrives. When I refurbed one for my girlfriend at the time, I "cheaped out" and replaced it with a CompactFlash that was bigger, faster, and more resilient. I'm sure I have the busted old MicroDrive around here somewhere still, because I tend to keep "neat" tech items.

I actually had a "thumb drive" that used a MicroDrive. At the time, it made for a huge portable drive, but it ended up not surviving very long.