when I first saw this on the shelf at
the thrift store I thought it was just
an
old and oddly shaped USB flash drive
but then I noticed where it says
portable USB hard drive
it's a MicroGem QuickiDrive
sold at CompUSA in October 2006
for $39.99... two gigabytes
and it says "no more floppies or bulky
disks
store and transfer files, music, photos,
videos, and graphics anywhere you go
travel tough rubberized coating... touch me"
and they give you a little hole to touch
it and yes like most
rubberized coatings from this age it has
gone sticky
so here you can see the size comparison
between a typical USB flash drive
commonly known as a thumb drive because
it's approximately the size of your
thumb
and this USB hard drive but it's still a
lot smaller than the USB hard drives
you're probably familiar with
this is a common 2.5 inch USB
hard drive
that's because whereas this has a
2.5 inch laptop style hard drive
in it
this one has a one inch MicroDrive in
it
MicroDrives were invented in 1999
by IBM and Hitachi they are a one inch
mechanical spinning hard drive
that uses the same interface as Compact
Flash cards
and actually Compact Flash cards came
out first, a couple years earlier
but they were very expensive and they
had very limited storage capacity
so the solution at the time was to make
a smaller hard drive
that would fit in almost the same size
as a Compact Flash card. They were just a
little bit
thicker but most devices that can accept
the Compact Flash card can also accept a
MicroDrive
MicroDrives were most popularly used in
the early to mid 2000s
in digital cameras, camcorders, portable
MP3 players, and pocket PCs
and for a price comparison in 2003
a 4 GB MicroDrive cost
$500
and a 4 GB Compact Flash card
cost
$1500, so a MicroDrive
was obviously much
cheaper but by 2006 the prices of flash
memory had dropped rapidly
I saw one report of someone who bought a
4 GB Compact Flash card
in September 2006 for $59
after a rebate so to get a 2 GB
MicroDrive for $39
you're not really doing that much better
on price. So this must have been the last
gasp of these MicroDrives, to try to
sell them as USB
hard drives and in addition to the
2 GB version here I've also seen
these QuickiDrives
in 4, 5, and 6 GB capacities
these MicroDrive based QuickiDrives
may be the smallest
USB hard drives ever made. There were
smaller hard drives than these Micro
Drives -- Toshiba introduced a 0.85 inch
hard drive
and there's one Japanese company called
Elecom which
at least announced that they were going
to sell USB hard drives with those
0.85 inch drives in them but aside from
their Japanese web site and a couple
press releases at the time
I can't find any evidence of them
actually reaching market
at least outside of Japan, so I'm pretty
sure at least in North America
these were the smallest USB hard drives
ever made
I also noticed there's something
rattling around inside this
that's because it comes with a cable as
it mentions on the back so in case you
don't want to have this big thing
hanging off your computer's USB port
you can attach it to the included USB
extension cable. So I'm going to open
this up
see if it works and just so we have a
fair comparison I have a 2 GB
Compact Flash card. Now, this is a lot
newer than 2006
but it's some no-name brand so I'm not
expecting it to be one of the really
high performance versions of these.
Inside the package we get the Quicki
Drive
whose rubberized coating has definitely
gone very sticky with age
so I've wrapped some electrical tape
around it so I can at least handle it
without getting my fingers all sticky
you also get the USB extension cable
which is surprisingly
thick and well-shielded. Also a quick
installation guide for PC,
Mac, and Linux and if you want an example
of why Linux didn't really catch on
here's instructions for Windows and Mac
and they basically just say plug it in
and it should work but in the Linux
instructions it tells you to execute
this very long
and complicated terminal command
then check the device information in
hwconf
write down the mount point, make a
directory in
/mnt for example, mkdir /mnt/
usbhd
then execute mount /dev/sda1
/mt/usbhd if mount point was
.dev/sda
yeah, that's why 2006 didn't turn out to
be the year of Linux on the desktop
after all
that sticky rubberized coating was
unacceptable
so I tried cleaning it with some alcohol
wipes and that actually worked
it got rid of all the stickiness now it
doesn't look that great you can
see a splotchy appearance but that's a
lot better than having it
be all sticky when you try to touch it
obviously a spinning mechanical hard
drive in there is going to generate heat
so they give it a little sort of
Transformers-style
cooling vent on it and that looks like
an
access indicator LED and this is the cap
for the USB
connector which is rather firmly
attached
but there it is. And here's a computer
from 2006 that I'm going to test it with
my ThinkPad T61, but the problem is these
are the only two USB
ports on the machine -- they're both
vertical and right next to each other
so that means I'll need to use this USB
extension cable that came with the
QuickiDrive
and I'm going to hold the QuickiDrive
right up to the camcorder
when I plug it in, so maybe you can hear
it spin up
well, I could hear it seeking the heads
but I couldn't really hear the
spindle motor and from this normal
distance that I have it in front of me
here I can't hear anything
so these MicroDrives are nice and quiet
and the computer recognized the drive
and it came
pre-formatted to FAT32 and the actual
capacity
if you're going to measure in decimal
gigabytes is 2.14
gigabytes now I'm going to use h2testw
to verify the drive and to check how
fast it is
so this is the test of the MicroDrive
and I'll come back when it's done
and see the results. Here it is writing
the data and maybe you can just barely
hear it
the test of the MicroDrive is complete
and it finished without errors
you can see the writing and verifying
speeds: 3.47 megabytes per second writing
and 4.62 megabytes per second verifying
or
reading which is within the advertised
range for these MicroDrives
they're supposed to give you between
4 and 6 megabytes per second
and after being on for about 20 minutes
the MicroDrive is warm to the touch
but it's not hot. Now I'll plug in the
Compact Flash card and its reader
and there's the Compact Flash card. You
can see it shows up as
1.84 gigabytes according to Windows
or if you're going to measure it in
decimal gigabytes it's 1.986
gigabytes. Now I'm going to run the test
on the Compact Flash card
and I'll come back when that's done. The
test of the Compact Flash card is done
and you can see the write speed is
actually not that much faster than the
MicroDrive
it's about the same as the reading speed
of the MicroDrive
but the verify or reading speed of the
Compact Flash card is a lot faster
but this is not a vintage Compact Flash
card from 2006 that I'm
comparing it to. It's some modern cheapo
brand card which is still probably a lot
faster than the cards that were
available back then
there's the QuickiDrive popped apart
which was a lot easier than I expected
all it took was a little bit of prying
and it just snapped apart
and it really is just a Compact Flash
card reader
with a USB port on it, and the Micro
Drive
is a MagicStor 2.2 gigabyte
so that's why it's larger than
2 gigabytes and it is an IDE
drive I know some of these MicroDrives
that were used in things like
MP3 players had a custom firmware which
prevented you from using them as a
standard
IDE drive but this one says right on it
ATA/IDE and there you can kind of
see
how it's a tiny little hard drive in the
space of a Compact Flash card. So here is
the comparison
to the solid state Compact Flash card:
the same form factor, it's just a little
bit thicker
I think these MicroDrives are great for
vintage computers because you can use
them with any
inexpensive Compact Flash to IDE adapter
either this one for converting it to a
3.5 inch
IDE interface for a desktop PC
or one of these for a 2.5
inch
drive for a laptop and it fits and works
just fine
just like a Compact Flash card would
except it's a real
mechanical spinning hard drive so in
case you just don't feel right
putting a solid-state flash memory drive
in a vintage computer
you can use one of these and it'll be a
lot faster and smaller
and quieter and use less power than an
old-fashioned mechanical hard drive but
it's still
a hard drive, just in a much smaller
form factor. And they made these Micro
Drives in capacities up to 16 gigabytes
but even this one at 2.2 gigabytes is
more than you would ever need
on a computer like this which is a 486
so even though these QuickiDrives are
pretty much
useless these days for the originally
intended purpose of being a portable
USB hard drive you can easily crack them
open
and take out the MicroDrive inside it
and then use it with your vintage
computer or if you really wanted to you
could stick a Compact Flash card in the
QuickiDrive
and just use it as a really ugly Compact
Flash card reader