Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “This TINY Hard Drive is REAL… and it changed the world!”.
Did you know that there were digital cameras that took floppy disk 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, something 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 changed our sponsor the ridge meet your new everyday. Carry the ridge wallet made with premium quality materials. The ridge wallet will surely replace your old bulky wallet. I know it has mine check out the link below and use code Linus to save 10 off your purchase and get free shipping.
Let me set the stage it was the mid 90s and compact flash was becoming the de facto 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 PCM CIA cards or PC cards as they’d, eventually be renamed, Because no one could remember what the acronyms stood for anyway were typically used to add additional. I o to a laptop, but realistically they could be used for pretty much anything, including storage. So, by designing the compact flash card to be pin compatible with pcmcia 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 two 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 megabytes 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 microdrive released in 1999, would store more than 80 of those same images in its 170 megabyte capacity or almost 180 in the 340 megabyte version. Suddenly, digital photography had an actual advantage over the 24 to 36 exposures. You could get with a roll 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 megabyte version. This convenience was Within Reach for prosumers and enthusiasts alike, which sounds crazy for a dollar fifty a megabyte. But you got to consider that compared to the two dollars and fifty cents, 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 parts small enough to fit in the CF form factor which shockingly they did. The tiny platter spun at 4, 500 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 one inch, 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 400 and the unbelievable one gigabyte Drive, which I’m holding in my hand, was just 500. less than 50 cents, a Meg that was even a real 1024 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 solid-state compact flash reached 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 sleep time of 15 milliseconds, at least on paper.
We got our hands on a one gigabyte 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 in Crystal disk 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: Y2K got it and move on now.
In 2001, you could get a first generation microdrive 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 iomega. Releasing a 340 megabyte drive and announced using a one 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 microdrive 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 microdrive, announcing two and four gigabyte models to be released in 2004 and a six gigabyte in 2005, with prices as low as 4 Cents, a megabyte we tested one of these two gigabyte models and honestly it mostly just made us feel better about our results with the one gig. It managed only four to five megabytes per second reads and just two megabytes per second rights with random reads and writes all pretty poor around 0.3 megabytes per second across the board. Of course, randoms don’t matter, though, because these aren’t made to run an operating system anyway.
For were they we’ll get to that later. First up, the mid-2000s saw both Seagate and Western Digital get into the Micro Drive Market with various storage capacities. Seagate drives notably found their way into the iPod mini. Oh, I guess we’re getting to that.
Now then, along with Hitachi strives released in 2004, the iPod mini was the little brother of the original iPod and used a micro drive to cram four gigabytes 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 its sales in 2004 and then jump through the roof in 2005, with the addition of a six gigabyte model and the introduction of the even smaller Nano, which was the first iPod to use flash memory throughout the mid-2000s. Other manufacturers would include micro drives and various media players and even a couple of pdas like Palms lifedrive, but none of them had the longevity or the cultural impact of the iPod. In our testing, the six gigabyte Seagate Drive was a significant improvement over previous generations, with sequential reads of up to 9 megabytes. A second and writes it up to 7.74 random.
Read performance, though, fell off slightly and random writes 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, microdrive was already riding off into the sunset flash based CF cards had caught up in capacity eight gig cards for 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 two gig compact flash cards we’re 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 gigabyte 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 ltdstore.com, see how I snuck that in there that that little stealthy light yeah. I know it was a stretch for context. We also brought along a full-size three and a half inch hard drive, because theoretically, everything in here should be in here just smaller, it’s wild.
What the devil is that bit tri-wing? 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 oh read and write heads at the ends of these actuator arms. So you’ve got many platters because it’s a very high capacity, disc. Okay, your controller is going to be probably under there somewhere, yeah yeah there you go controller is right there on that PCB.
Okay, now Micro Drive, okay, okay, it seems to be a sticker. Oh all right is that it then, is that the platter – 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 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. I think 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 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 like 500 left, it’s so cute. Ah I’m done! 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, write head on one side and then a read, write head on the other side. You don’t need this. This, like stack this assembly of them and honestly that’s about it. The microtrive really did hit the market at just about the perfect time.
Didn’T it, it’s 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 message from our sponsor secret lab their chairs are engineered to keep you incredibly comfortable for long hours at work and play their Titan Evo 2022 series chair offers. Four-Way lumbar support comes with a magnetic memory, foam head pillow and is offered in different upholsteries, like hybrid leatherette, soft weave fabric and Napa leather, with up to a five-year extended, warranty and 49-day return policy you’re covered if anything goes wrong so head to the link in The description and check out secret lab today, if you guys enjoyed this video, maybe you’ll, enjoy the video about a much larger storage project. The mother vault many petabytes, it’s good! It’S fine! .