WEBVTT

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did you know that there were digital cameras that took floppy discs for

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storage pretty cool right well yes but also terrible since each of these can

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only hold a handful of low resolution images at a time and carrying around a

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whole Rolodex of them with you while you're out taking pictures not very

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practical but what choice did we have flash media as we know it today wouldn't

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be able to cost effectively store thousands or even hundreds of files on

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one card for at least another decade but

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what if we could get this into this well

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believe it or not that's exactly what IBM did introducing the Micro Drive a

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tiny spinning hard drive that changed both hobbyist photography and consumer

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electronics forever just like this video

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shipping let me set the stage it was the

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mid90s and compact flash was becoming the deao standard for storage in the

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emerging world of digital photography and why not compact flash offered strong

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performance for the time and enjoyed widespread compatibility

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all without SanDisk needing to sell a single card reader wait what okay so

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here's how they did that the interface used a 50 pin subset of the 68 pin

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pcmcia connector that was common on laptop computers throughout the '90s and

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into the early 2000s pcmcia cards or PC

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cards as they'd eventually be renamed because no one could remember what the

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acronym stood for anyway were typically used to add additional IO to a laptop

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but realistically they could be used used for pretty much anything including

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storage so by designing the compact flash card to be pin compatible with PCM

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CIA and then bundling an inexpensive adapter sled in the Box SanDisk could be

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sure that pretty much anyone with a laptop could read their card format

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remember this was all happening before USB came along in

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1996 and even Apple power books of the era included pcmcia slots Apple's

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allergy to expansion evidently hadn't developed yet

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the only thing holding CF back was the price of the media functional flash

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storage in general was only 2 years old when CF was introduced and it took until

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1998 for SanDisk to offer a 24 megabyte

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CF card for context in that same year

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the Canon PowerShot Pro 70 shot uncompressed raw images that took up 1.9

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mbes each yikes I think you can see

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where this is going because it's obvious that IBM couldn't have picked a better

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time to introduce the Micro Drive the First Generation Micro Drive released in

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1999 would store more than 80 of those same images in its 170 MB capacity or

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almost 180 in the 340 MB version

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suddenly digital photography had an actual advantage over the 24 to 36

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exposures you could get with a role of film especially when you factor in that

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you could review and delete your images right on the camera to clear up space

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and at just $500 for the 340 megab version this convenience was Within

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Reach for prosumers and enthusiasts alike which sounds crazy $150 a megabyte

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but you got to consider that compared to the $2.50 a megabyte that you'd pay for

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an 80 Meg compact flash card that was a heck of a deal now IBM's pricing

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Advantage seems unintuitive to us today

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a whole complex mechanical device in here what but because hard drive

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technology was already so mature compared to flash it was just a matter

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of figuring out how to make the part small enough to fit in the CF form

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factor which shockingly they did the

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tiny platter spun at 4500 RPM with an

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average seek time of 15 milliseconds and

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rather than running full time and blowing through your camera's battery

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they would operate more like a floppy Drive spinning up and down as needed

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having successfully Shrunk the drive down to 1 in then then all IBM had to do

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next was increase capacity the very next

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year we got the aptly named second generation of micro drives IBM really is

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a lot better at engineering than branding anyway the 512 megabyte Drive

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was available for $4 and the unbelievable 1 GB Drive which I'm

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holding in my hand was just 500 less

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than 50 cents a Meg that was even a real

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1,24 Meg Gigabyte by the way not the 1,000 megabyte gigs that hard drive

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manufacturers have adopted in modern times the year 2000 also saw solidstate

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compact flash reach 256 megabytes quite

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the Milestone but the issue was the cost at almost eight times as much per Meg

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now the Second Generation Micro drives and most of the ones that followed spun

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span at 3600 RPM but they still managed

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to maintain the same average seek time of 15 milliseconds at least on paper we

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got our hands on a 1 gbyte specimen but the years haven't been particularly kind

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to this one after some coaxing we were at least able to get through two passes

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of each read test and Crystal dis Mark but we managed only 4.4 megabytes per

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second in sequential reads with some other fairly unimpressive numbers and

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sometimes where it would just stay at zero so I think it's safe to say um y 2K

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got it and move on now in 2001 you could

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get a First Generation Micro Drive for free thanks to Canon bundling the lower

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capacity micro drives in with some of their high-end cameras IBM themselves

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further reduced costs getting them down to just over 30 cents per megabyte for

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the second gen drives and 2001 saw the first competition with I Omega releasing

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a 340 megabyte drive and announcing a 1

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Gigabyte drive now their prices were a couple years behind IBM but with more

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Fighters entering the ring surely Innovation would follow and the future

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for Micro Drive would be bright and for a while it seemed that way it was around

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that time that IBM's storage technology division was acquired by Hitachi and the

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new Hitachi division took over the development of the Micro Drive

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announcing two and four Gigabyte models to be released in 2004 and a 6 gab in

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2005 with prices as low as 4 cents a

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megabyte we tested one of these 2 GB models and honestly it mostly just made

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us feel better about our results with the 1 gig it managed only four to 5

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megabytes per second reads and just 2 megabytes per second rights with random

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reads and writes all pretty poor around3 megab per second across the board of

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course randoms don't matter though because these aren't made to run an

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operating system anyway or were they

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we'll get to that later first up the mid 20000s saw both Seagate and Western

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Digital get into the Micro Drive Market with various storage capacities

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seagate's drives notably found their way into the iPod mini oh I guess we're

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getting to that now then along with hitachi's drives released in 2004 the

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iPod mini was the little brother of the original iPod and used a micro drive to

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cram 4 gigabyt of music into its smaller

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form factor which started the trend of the ever shrinking iPod while helping

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the iPod family to more than double it sales in 2004 and then jump through the

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roof in 2005 with the addition of a 6 GB

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model and the introduction of the even smaller Nano which was the first iPod to

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use flash memory throughout the mid 000s other manufacturers would include micro

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drives in various media players and even a couple of pdas like Palm's life drive

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but none of them had the longevity or the cultural impact of the iPod in our

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testing the 6 GB Seagate Drive was a significant improvement over previous

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generations with sequential reads of up to 9 megabytes a second and rights of up

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to 7.74 random read performance though fell

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off slightly and random rights only managed about 60% of what we saw before

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this was definitely not a device to do a lot of random writing to but it was more

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than enough to handle the lightweight iPod system software at the time and the

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limited user input courtesy of the wheel interface so things still looked like

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they were going pretty well but by 2007

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after its short time in the light Micro Drive was already riding off into the

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sunset flash-based CF cards had caught up in capacity 8 gig cards were becoming

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commercially available taking away any capacity advantage and prices

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particularly of lower capacity flash-based competitors were dropping

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rapidly thanks to Moore's Law which was alive and well at the time 2 gig compact

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flash cards were selling for as little as 30 bucks meaning that there was no

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longer any reason to have a tiny platter of metal spinning at thousands of

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revolutions per minute inside your portable device transfer speeds were

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also up with minimum requirements for new standards of compact flash calling

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for at least 10 megabytes per second easily matching the performance of our

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final sample an 8 GB drive from Seagate

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now if you're anything like me you're probably dying to take a look inside one

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of these things so why don't we see if we can take one apart but first you

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should check out our stealth desk pads available now on LTD store.com see how I

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snuck that in there that that all stealthy light yeah I know it was a

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stretch for context we also brought along a fullsize three and a halfin hard

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drive theoretically everything in here should be in here just smaller

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wild what the devil is that bit triwing

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oh my goodness here is a regular hard drive then don't worry these were both

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dead and out of warranty before we took them apart there's your magnetic storage

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medium there's your read and right heads

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at the ends of these uh actuator arms so you've got many platters CU it's a very

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high capacity disc okay your controller

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is going to be probably under there somewhere yeah

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yeah there you go controllers right there on that PCB okay now Micro

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Drive okay okay it seems to be a

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sticker all right is that it then is

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that the platter oh oh oh no way no way no way

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this whole thing is just the compact

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flash interface and the controller board

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this is the hard drive it's even smaller and cuter than I thought look at this no

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that's what she said this isn't the platter this is all sealed okay so this

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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

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actually need to take the top cover off

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okay see this is this it makes this

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thing makes me feel like a big giant person or something okay so you can see

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it's got like a really strong like a reinforced frame around

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it that's it's going to be really important for keeping everything stable

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inside while it's spinning I've never even held one of these before back when

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these were modern technology like there's no way I could $500

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what it's so

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cute I'm dead oh my God it really is

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exactly just a hard drive but tiny it

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looks like a freaking novelty thing like it doesn't even seem real it seems like

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the kind of thing you just put on your keychain you know the funny thing is I

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was expecting to show you guys like oh here's the you know the read heads and

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the actuator and you know here's kind of the analog for that well it's pretty

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obvious what's what in here it's just this but tiny there are a couple of

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differences like for one thing because there's only a single platter in here

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you've only got a read right head on one side and then a read right head on the

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other side you don't need this this like stack this assembly of them and honestly

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that's about it the Micro Drive really did hit the market at just about the

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perfect time didn't it its strong price to storage ratio allowed it to dominate

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the emerging digital photography Market while flash media was struggling through

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puberty and even when its days were numbered by the mid 2000s it helped to

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shrink the MP3 player to fit into everyone's pocket making giant portable

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music players a thing of the past sorry creative Nomad jukebox oh and sorry this

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to the link in the description and check out secret lab today if you guys enjoyed

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this video maybe you'll enjoy the video about a much larger storage project the

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mother Vault many pedabytes it's good it's fun