Micro drives

gus · January 13, 2004

Anyone had any experience with 'micro drives' ? My camera can take one, they hold heaps but hard drives & me dont get along.

wxwax · January 13, 2004

No direct experience. I think Patch will tell you that because they're not solid state, they're more fragile than solid state flash memory, and more likely to break or breakdown.

zero-zero · January 13, 2004

Totally true. However, I have a couple of them, and after one and two years of heavy use, respectively, I have suffered no errors or problems with them, even when I've taken them off-roading. I trust them as much as my other cards (read: not 100%, but I don't lose sleep after them). As with any other card, it's a good idea to format it or wipe-erase it once in a while.

patch29 · January 13, 2004

wxwax wrote:

No direct experience. I think Patch will tell you that because they're not solid state, they're more fragile than solid state flash memory, and more likely to break or breakdown.

Well said, but like zero-zero I have two that are used on occasion and have worked fine. I also used them near 0 deg F and close to 10,000ft elevation. I was warned they would not like that or work well, but at the time they were all I had and they were fine. I did work hard to keep the camera warm though so it did not totally freeze, but it was outside for at least 45 min. If I am buying today I would spend the extra money and get CF cards.

Mike Werner · January 13, 2004

I've had one for 2 years now. Never ever failed !! Faster than normal memory. Just keep shooting and don't care about how many I take. Sort it out later on the PC.

Baldy · January 13, 2004

I was standing beside Robert Oliver while shooting a triathlon, who is a renowned sports photographer, and he told me he would never touch them. I went home thinking, "glad I'm not a pro that needs *that* much reliability."

A few months later I spent several hours shooting, went home and nada. Card wouldn't read. Nothing could be recovered, not even by IBM.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. A microdrive has never entered my camera since.

cmr164 · January 13, 2004

Baldy wrote:

I was standing beside Robert Oliver while shooting a triathlon, who is a renowned sports photographer, and he told me he would never touch them. I went home thinking, "glad I'm not a pro that needs *that* much reliability."

A few months later I spent several hours shooting, went home and nada. Card wouldn't read. Nothing could be recovered, not even by IBM.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. A microdrive has never entered my camera since.

The failure rates for CF cards and microdrives are fairly comparable. Yes one has moving parts but the other has billions of transistors. Either can go bad and both have been known to do so. I have had 4 Microdrives over the past 4 years and the are all still working. The original two 340M ones are doing PDA duty and the two 1G Microdrives are always in the DCS520 (2 slots). No failures and 15K images plus lots of sneakernet duty. In a camera with a decent firmware (not the D30) the microdrive is as much as 8 times faster in transferring images.

Mike Werner · January 14, 2004

My brother who owns the BeneLux's largest press photoagency (WFA) has 250 photographers. All equipped wth digital cameras, and all have microdrives !

The point of failure is rarely the disc itself, but the edge connectors...

Tugrik · January 14, 2004

I've got two 1GB'ers that I've used since first getting the D30, and now use on my 10D (and the occasional 1D rental). I treat them with more care and respect than I do compact flash just out of habit.

Earlier on the cost per Mbyte was what made them desireable; accepting their mechanical nature (possibly easier to damage) was just the check and balance for the savings. Nowadays that's not so true. If I was only going for 1Gb in size I'd buy a fast compact flash these days.

Now, in the 4Gb range, the new microdrives hitting the market still have a price and speed advantage. We'll see how this plays out.

gus · January 15, 2004

Thanks all...experienced people say they hate 'em & experienced people say they love 'em. I'm off o/s for 4 weeks soon to tour 4 countries in africa camping out so i have taken all the advice seriously. I hate the idea of a small moving device but at the same time i am reletivly new to digital (1 year) & have had a card fail once so far. I am simply going to take a few thousand shots & leave them on until i get home.

Im leaning towards a handfull of 256 xD cards.

Thanks again everyone.

wxwax · January 15, 2004

Sounds like a safe option, Mark. Just don't lose the cards!

zero-zero · January 15, 2004

Humungus wrote:

Im leaning towards a handfull of 256 xD cards.

That's a good strategy. When I travel, I make sure I switch cards throughout the day even if they're not full, and if I'm taking important pics I'll see them distributed over two or three cards so a total loss in one is not catastrophic. They are easy to sort correctly later using their time stamp.

Worth repeating: instead of simply erasing the cards, format them every now and then, say after filling them up two or three times or after doing a lot of discarding directly on the card. They'll appreciate that. And maybe search the web for one of the many CF recovery tools available (some are free).

cmr164 · January 15, 2004

A plus for microdrives
One thing that is not getting mentioned and that is very pertinent to travel is that having the very biggest cards/microdrives means you are never taking a chance dropping then and you are not opening your camera to the elements (dust, sand, water, etc) to change a card. You load up in your hotel and you unload in your hotel. That alone makes the microdrive a better choice.

pathfinder · January 20, 2004

cmr164 wrote:

One thing that is not getting mentioned and that is very pertinent to travel is that having the very biggest cards/microdrives means you are never taking a chance dropping then and you are not opening your camera to the elements (dust, sand, water, etc) to change a card. You load up in your hotel and you unload in your hotel. That alone makes the microdrive a better choice.

I use Compact flash - 1 Gb and 512 Mb - in my Canon D10. I have had one 1 GB Sandisk Ultra Compact Flash fail on me and had to resort to rescue software to recover the pictures. I have even less faith in moving parts.

My laptop does not have a CD burner - it is 4 years old PIII 600MHz - but I bought a Toshiba(?) 5 Gb hard drive that fits into one PCMCIA slot on the laptop - so I write my files to the hard drive in the laptop and a duplicate into the 5 Gb portable drive in the slot in my laptop - I am kind of a belt and suspenders kind of guy with digital pictures - In the other PCMCIA slot I park a WI-Fi card to use to access high bandwith where ever I can find it. http://www.broadbandreports.com/shownews/29766 gives a list of WI-Fi hotspots - then you can upload to the web for storage - thank you Smugmug!

I have looked at the portable CD burners but I think that by the time you get the chargers and all the burned and blank CDs you will have more to carry than I do with my little old laptop. And I worry abpout physical damage to a bunch of CDs rattling around in a Jesse bag on the side of a motorcycle.

Find a used laptop on ebay - like a Pentium 500 without a CD burner - they will not cost much more than the CD burners you are discussing. ( I just found a Dell PIII 500 MHz in a quick search for $147 and and IBM 600MHz for $102 ) The Toshiba PCMCIA hard drives will run a couple hundred bucks too - but they are reusable. A quick search on Froogle shows that Dell sells the Toshiba 5 Gb drive for $299 today. The little 5 GB drives seem to be pretty durable and are NOT state of the art - but established routine technology.

Micro drives

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