Anyone using microdrives?

tlittleton · May 17, 2005

I was looking at getting a bigger CF card for my camera, and noticed that for the price of one Lexar 4GB Pro, I could almost buy two 6GB Hitachi Microdrives. Does anyone use these? The extra space would be great, but I know the transfer rates are a little slower than the Lexar Pro cards.

At first I was concerned about them being bumped around, but I figure that if they can use something this size in an iPod Mini, it should be okay in my camera.

Of course, then there is battery life to consider....:scratch

Any thoughts on that?

JamesJWeg · May 17, 2005

I have one and am happy with it. I understand that they are not as durable as a CF card, but I have had no issues at all. The D2H that I am using it in has enough buffer to compensate for the speed issue most of the time, but the speed differance is noticable.

James.

ian408 · May 17, 2005

I'm a reasonably happy Microdrive user.

I've purposefully dropped the thing and it's still ok. But as has been mentioned,
they are SLOW to write. If you're shooting high speed action and use the
shotgun approach to getting good pictures, this probably isn't for you. If you're
shooting with a 1ds or similar, I probably wouldn't use one (write speed too
slow).

Ian

Michiel de Brieder · May 17, 2005

I have a 1 GB IBM card. I'm quite satisfied with it, even though it's a little slow...

CtPhotoGirl · May 19, 2005

we use the 4gb microdrives.. Im instrested in what people say about this as well.
We have 4... Two for my camera two for my husbands.. Once we are full on one.. well not complete becasue we dont like to "take all the photos" on one.. we like to unload the other and it takes a long eitm to offload one.. so we needed to get another to put in the camer and take photos as one was unloading...
we have been using them for the past year and NO faults what so ever we havent run into any problems using them. *knock on wood*

I recommed these... You DO have to format them.. just like any CF card

XO-Studios · May 19, 2005

tlittleton wrote:

I was looking at getting a bigger CF card for my camera, and noticed that for the price of one Lexar 4GB Pro, I could almost buy two 6GB Hitachi Microdrives. Does anyone use these? The extra space would be great, but I know the transfer rates are a little slower than the Lexar Pro cards.

At first I was concerned about them being bumped around, but I figure that if they can use something this size in an iPod Mini, it should be okay in my camera.

Of course, then there is battery life to consider....

Any thoughts on that?

Ok I have a NIKON D70
I have 2 512 Mb flashcards which are lightning fast, and one 2Gb Hitachi Microdrive.

A couple of things:
For action I always use the flashcards, they are significantly faster and on my D70 the difference is noticeable (actually the difference is humongous) now pending your camera, teh difference might be unnoticeable.

So far my microdrive has been flawless, and I find that 2 Gb is plenty for what I do. The microdrive is fast enough for the usual snap, recompose, focus, snap, i.e. other than action, continuous shooting, I never have to wait for the microdrive.

Batterylife, the microdrive will significantly reduce my batterylife, lookup on Thom Hogans site what the difference is. Now with that said, with my D70 battery life as is, we are talking something like 500 shots with a flash card vs 200 some with a microdrive.

PCMCIA card adapter. The flashcards fit perfectly into a little adapter that first my laptop PCMCIA card, the microdrive does not. The microdrive does however fit the flash card slot on the desktop.

FWIW,
YMMV,

XO,

Nikolai · May 19, 2005

Not using it anymore

tlittleton wrote:

I was looking at getting a bigger CF card for my camera, and noticed that for the price of one Lexar 4GB Pro, I could almost buy two 6GB Hitachi Microdrives. Does anyone use these? The extra space would be great, but I know the transfer rates are a little slower than the Lexar Pro cards.

At first I was concerned about them being bumped around, but I figure that if they can use something this size in an iPod Mini, it should be okay in my camera.

Of course, then there is battery life to consider....

Any thoughts on that?

I had one incident with my 5Gb (I admit, it was pulled out of Rio and was not designed for generic use), which made me drop the idea of using moving parts in a field environment. I'm using CF solid state cards now and happy with them. Yes, they are more expensive, but imagine what happens if you lose 6Gb worth of unique pictures..
Just my 2 bits:-)

ian408 · May 19, 2005

Nikolai wrote:

I had one incident with my 5Gb (I admit, it was pulled out of Rio and was not designed for generic use), which made me drop the idea of using moving parts in a field environment. I'm using CF solid state cards now and happy with them. Yes, they are more expensive, but imagine what happens if you lose 6Gb worth of unique pictures..
Just my 2 bits:-)

Just so you know, it happens with solid state stuff too. Otherwise, why would
Lexar ship image rescue software with their CF cards

Ian

tlittleton · May 19, 2005

ian408 wrote:

Lexar ship image rescue software with their CF cards

Ian

Heh...only problem is they put it on the card. Which of course I promptly formatted in camera.:D

Nikolai · May 20, 2005

yes, but

ian408 wrote:

Just so you know, it happens with solid state stuff too. Otherwise, why would
Lexar ship image rescue software with their CF cards

Ian

not to the degree it happens to MDs.. I never even heard of solid-state CF card going sour, while with MDs I heard a bunch and experienced it first-hand..:-(

ian408 · May 20, 2005

Nikolai wrote:

not to the degree it happens to MDs.. I never even heard of solid-state CF card going sour, while with MDs I heard a bunch and experienced it first-hand..:-(

Some memories have something called flex-repair that allow them to be
"fixed" on the fly. Meaning they have the equiv of what used to be done
using fuses at the factory during manufacture, is now done on powerup
each and every time the part is powered up. So these become more reliable.

I would agree that solid state is more reliable than mechanical storage
devices. But don't fool yourself into thinking that because it's solid state
it won't fail

Ian

pathfinder · May 21, 2005

Nikolai wrote:

not to the degree it happens to MDs.. I never even heard of solid-state CF card going sour, while with MDs I heard a bunch and experienced it first-hand..:-(

I had a SanDisk 1 Gb Ultra card fail after one photo shoot in a 10D. And Sandisk did replace it as defective with an Ultra II. I have also lost images with a Lexar 80X CF card, like was described recently at dpreview.com

I have used a 4Gb MicroDrive for 2 years without incident.

So I agree with Ian, I favor CF - solid state - over mechanical drives, but neither is without its failures. I off load my images to two seperate hard drives and a DVD for final storage.

Anyone using microdrives?

Comments