- Did you know that there were digital cameras
that took floppy dust 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.
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.
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- Let me set the stage.
It was the mid nineties
and compact Flash was becoming the defacto 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 PCM CIA connector that was common
on laptop computers throughout the nineties
and into the early two thousands.
PCM CIA 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
for pretty much anything including storage.
So by designing the compact flash card to
be pinned 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 U SB came along
in 1996 and even Apple Power Books
of the era included PCM CIA 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 Cannon Power Shot 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 micro drive 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.
A $1,50 a megabyte, but you gotta consider
that compared to the $2,50 cents a megabyte
that you'd pay for an 80 meg compact flashcard
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 seat 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 mega gigabyte, by the way
not the 1000 megabyte gigs that hard drive
manufacturers have adopted in modern times.
The year 2000 also saw solid state 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 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 reed test in crystal disc 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 micro drive
for free thanks to
Cannon 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 announcing 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 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 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 rights.
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
or were they?
We'll get to that later.
First up, the mid two thousands 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 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 it sales
in 2004 and then jumped 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 two thousands.
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 six gigabyte Seagate Drive was a significant improvement
over previous generations with sequential reads
of up to nine 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 carts had caught up in capacity.
Eight 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.
Two gig compact flashcards 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 and eight 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.
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See how I snuck that in there?
That that meant that stealthy like?
Yeah, I know it was a stretch
for context, we also brought
along a full size three and a half inch hard drive.
Cause' theoretically everything in here should be in here.
Just smaller.
Just wild.
What the devil is that bit?
Try 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 ooh reading and right heads
at the ends of these actuator arms.
So you've got many platters
cause' it's a very high capacity disc.
Okay, your controller's gonna be
probably under there
somewhere. Yeah, there you go.
Controllers 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, 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
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 gonna 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?
Oh, it's so cute.
Oh my god.
It really is exactly just a hard drive,
but tiny
it looks like a fricking novelty thing.
Like it doesn't even seem real.
It seems like the kind of thing
you just put on your key chain.
The funny thing is I was expecting to
show you guys like, oh, here's the,
read heads and the actuator and
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 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 two thousands
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.
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- If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe
you'll enjoy the video about a much larger storage project.
The Mother Vaults many petabytes.
It's good. It's fun.