Comments:
The Hitachi (HGST) Microdrive miniature hard disk drive artwork was commissioned
by the National Geographic for inclusion in a number of their articles explaining
the underlying technologies to various hi-tech products. I was pleased with it, so
were the folks at National Geographic, and from the amount of mail I received, I
think it went down okay with the public.
Description:
Microdrive is a brand name for a miniature, 1-inch hard disk designed to fit in a
Compact Flash (CF) Type II slot. The release of similar drives by other makers has
led to them often being referred to as 'microdrives'. However, 'microdrive' is not
a genericized trademark and manufacturers other than IBM up to 2003 and Hitachi after
do not officially refer to these drives as Microdrives. Some other companies, such
as Sony, have licensed the name and sell re-branded versions.
These drives fit into any CompactFlash II slot; however, they may consume more power
than flash memory (currents on the order of 190 mA, peak 310 mA, at 3.3 V) and therefore
may not work in some low-power devices (e.g. handheld computers). Nevertheless, they
have some benefits over flash memory in terms of the way data is stored and manipulated.
Microdrives can store 8 GB or more, but must be formatted for a file system which
supports this capacity, such as ext3 or NTFS, which may not be supported by older
CompactFlash hosts, but it is possible to partition a drive so it will contain a
partition less than 4 GB.
The Microdrive was developed and launched in 1999 by IBM with a capacity of 170 MB,
which was expanded to 8 GB by 2006. They weigh about 16 g (~1/2 oz), with dimensions
of 42.8×36.4×5 mm (1.7×1.4×.2 in). These were the smallest hard drives in the world
at the time. From 1999 to 2003 they were known as IBM Microdrives, and from 2003
as Hitachi Microdrives, when Hitachi bought IBM's hard drive division. Microdrive™
was a registered trademark by IBM and Hitachi for each period.
IBM initially released a 170 MB and 340 MB model. The next year 512 MB and 1 GB models
were announced and became available. In December 2002 Hitachi bought IBM's disk drive
business, including the Microdrive technology and brand. By 2003, under Hitachi,
bigger 2 GB models came out. Over the years, even larger sizes have become available.
Further information:
http://www.hgst.com/hdd/micro/overvw.htm
