did you know that there were digital cameras that took floppy discs for
storage pretty cool right well yes but also terrible since each of these can
only hold a handful of low resolution images at a time and carrying around a
whole Rolodex of them with you while you're out taking pictures not very
practical but what choice did we have flash media as we know it today wouldn't
be able to cost effectively store thousands or even hundreds of files on
one card for at least another decade but
what if we could get this into this well
believe it or not that's exactly what IBM did introducing the Micro Drive a
tiny spinning hard drive that changed both hobbyist photography and consumer
electronics forever just like this video
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shipping let me set the stage it was the
mid90s and compact flash was becoming the deao standard for storage in the
emerging world of digital photography and why not compact flash offered strong
performance for the time and enjoyed widespread compatibility
all without SanDisk needing to sell a single card reader wait what okay so
here's how they did that the interface used a 50 pin subset of the 68 pin
pcmcia connector that was common on laptop computers throughout the '90s and
into the early 2000s pcmcia cards or PC
cards as they'd eventually be renamed because no one could remember what the
acronym stood for anyway were typically used to add additional IO to a laptop
but realistically they could be used used for pretty much anything including
storage so by designing the compact flash card to be pin compatible with PCM
CIA and then bundling an inexpensive adapter sled in the Box SanDisk could be
sure that pretty much anyone with a laptop could read their card format
remember this was all happening before USB came along in
1996 and even Apple power books of the era included pcmcia slots Apple's
allergy to expansion evidently hadn't developed yet
the only thing holding CF back was the price of the media functional flash
storage in general was only 2 years old when CF was introduced and it took until
1998 for SanDisk to offer a 24 megabyte
CF card for context in that same year
the Canon PowerShot Pro 70 shot uncompressed raw images that took up 1.9
mbes each yikes I think you can see
where this is going because it's obvious that IBM couldn't have picked a better
time to introduce the Micro Drive the First Generation Micro Drive released in
1999 would store more than 80 of those same images in its 170 MB capacity or
almost 180 in the 340 MB version
suddenly digital photography had an actual advantage over the 24 to 36
exposures you could get with a role of film especially when you factor in that
you could review and delete your images right on the camera to clear up space
and at just $500 for the 340 megab version this convenience was Within
Reach for prosumers and enthusiasts alike which sounds crazy $150 a megabyte
but you got to consider that compared to the $2.50 a megabyte that you'd pay for
an 80 Meg compact flash card that was a heck of a deal now IBM's pricing
Advantage seems unintuitive to us today
a whole complex mechanical device in here what but because hard drive
technology was already so mature compared to flash it was just a matter
of figuring out how to make the part small enough to fit in the CF form
factor which shockingly they did the
tiny platter spun at 4500 RPM with an
average seek time of 15 milliseconds and
rather than running full time and blowing through your camera's battery
they would operate more like a floppy Drive spinning up and down as needed
having successfully Shrunk the drive down to 1 in then then all IBM had to do
next was increase capacity the very next
year we got the aptly named second generation of micro drives IBM really is
a lot better at engineering than branding anyway the 512 megabyte Drive
was available for $4 and the unbelievable 1 GB Drive which I'm
holding in my hand was just 500 less
than 50 cents a Meg that was even a real
1,24 Meg Gigabyte by the way not the 1,000 megabyte gigs that hard drive
manufacturers have adopted in modern times the year 2000 also saw solidstate
compact flash reach 256 megabytes quite
the Milestone but the issue was the cost at almost eight times as much per Meg
now the Second Generation Micro drives and most of the ones that followed spun
span at 3600 RPM but they still managed
to maintain the same average seek time of 15 milliseconds at least on paper we
got our hands on a 1 gbyte specimen but the years haven't been particularly kind
to this one after some coaxing we were at least able to get through two passes
of each read test and Crystal dis Mark but we managed only 4.4 megabytes per
second in sequential reads with some other fairly unimpressive numbers and
sometimes where it would just stay at zero so I think it's safe to say um y 2K
got it and move on now in 2001 you could
get a First Generation Micro Drive for free thanks to Canon bundling the lower
capacity micro drives in with some of their high-end cameras IBM themselves
further reduced costs getting them down to just over 30 cents per megabyte for
the second gen drives and 2001 saw the first competition with I Omega releasing
a 340 megabyte drive and announcing a 1
Gigabyte drive now their prices were a couple years behind IBM but with more
Fighters entering the ring surely Innovation would follow and the future
for Micro Drive would be bright and for a while it seemed that way it was around
that time that IBM's storage technology division was acquired by Hitachi and the
new Hitachi division took over the development of the Micro Drive
announcing two and four Gigabyte models to be released in 2004 and a 6 gab in
2005 with prices as low as 4 cents a
megabyte we tested one of these 2 GB models and honestly it mostly just made
us feel better about our results with the 1 gig it managed only four to 5
megabytes per second reads and just 2 megabytes per second rights with random
reads and writes all pretty poor around3 megab per second across the board of
course randoms don't matter though because these aren't made to run an
operating system anyway or were they
we'll get to that later first up the mid 20000s saw both Seagate and Western
Digital get into the Micro Drive Market with various storage capacities
seagate's drives notably found their way into the iPod mini oh I guess we're
getting to that now then along with hitachi's drives released in 2004 the
iPod mini was the little brother of the original iPod and used a micro drive to
cram 4 gigabyt of music into its smaller
form factor which started the trend of the ever shrinking iPod while helping
the iPod family to more than double it sales in 2004 and then jump through the
roof in 2005 with the addition of a 6 GB
model and the introduction of the even smaller Nano which was the first iPod to
use flash memory throughout the mid 000s other manufacturers would include micro
drives in various media players and even a couple of pdas like Palm's life drive
but none of them had the longevity or the cultural impact of the iPod in our
testing the 6 GB Seagate Drive was a significant improvement over previous
generations with sequential reads of up to 9 megabytes a second and rights of up
to 7.74 random read performance though fell
off slightly and random rights only managed about 60% of what we saw before
this was definitely not a device to do a lot of random writing to but it was more
than enough to handle the lightweight iPod system software at the time and the
limited user input courtesy of the wheel interface so things still looked like
they were going pretty well but by 2007
after its short time in the light Micro Drive was already riding off into the
sunset flash-based CF cards had caught up in capacity 8 gig cards were becoming
commercially available taking away any capacity advantage and prices
particularly of lower capacity flash-based competitors were dropping
rapidly thanks to Moore's Law which was alive and well at the time 2 gig compact
flash cards were selling for as little as 30 bucks meaning that there was no
longer any reason to have a tiny platter of metal spinning at thousands of
revolutions per minute inside your portable device transfer speeds were
also up with minimum requirements for new standards of compact flash calling
for at least 10 megabytes per second easily matching the performance of our
final sample an 8 GB drive from Seagate
now if you're anything like me you're probably dying to take a look inside one
of these things so why don't we see if we can take one apart but first you
should check out our stealth desk pads available now on LTD store.com see how I
snuck that in there that that all stealthy light yeah I know it was a
stretch for context we also brought along a fullsize three and a halfin hard
drive theoretically everything in here should be in here just smaller
wild what the devil is that bit triwing
oh my goodness here is a regular hard drive then don't worry these were both
dead and out of warranty before we took them apart there's your magnetic storage
medium there's your read and right heads
at the ends of these uh actuator arms so you've got many platters CU it's a very
high capacity disc okay your controller
is going to be probably under there somewhere yeah
yeah there you go controllers right there on that PCB okay now Micro
Drive okay okay it seems to be a
sticker all right is that it then is
that the platter oh oh oh no way no way no way
this whole thing is just the compact
flash interface and the controller board
this is the hard drive it's even smaller and cuter than I thought look at this no
that's what she said this isn't the platter this is all sealed okay so this
is just the back of the spindle motor that's what you're seeing here that's the hub for the spindle motor okay so we
actually need to take the top cover off
okay see this is this it makes this
thing makes me feel like a big giant person or something okay so you can see
it's got like a really strong like a reinforced frame around
it that's it's going to be really important for keeping everything stable
inside while it's spinning I've never even held one of these before back when
these were modern technology like there's no way I could $500
what it's so
cute I'm dead oh my God it really is
exactly just a hard drive but tiny it
looks like a freaking novelty thing like it doesn't even seem real it seems like
the kind of thing you just put on your keychain you know the funny thing is I
was expecting to show you guys like oh here's the you know the read heads and
the actuator and you know here's kind of the analog for that well it's pretty
obvious what's what in here it's just this but tiny there are a couple of
differences like for one thing because there's only a single platter in here
you've only got a read right head on one side and then a read right head on the
other side you don't need this this like stack this assembly of them and honestly
that's about it the Micro Drive really did hit the market at just about the
perfect time didn't it its strong price to storage ratio allowed it to dominate
the emerging digital photography Market while flash media was struggling through
puberty and even when its days were numbered by the mid 2000s it helped to
shrink the MP3 player to fit into everyone's pocket making giant portable
music players a thing of the past sorry creative Nomad jukebox oh and sorry this
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this video maybe you'll enjoy the video about a much larger storage project the
mother Vault many pedabytes it's good it's fun