Put Some Serious Memory In Your Camera with an IBM Microdrive (Digital Cameras in general)

Member Name: Nibelung

Product:	Digital Cameras in general
Date:	11/10/02 (241 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Much bigger capacity than Compact Flash, Cheaper on a £/megabyte basis than CF

Disadvantages: Higher battery drain = less time away from the charger, ?-mark on reliability?

I make no apologies for placing this here. it relates to IBM Microdrives which, in many cases can be used as a direct replacement for the Compact Flash card, one of the most popular means of storing digital photos in your camera.

SO JUST WHAT IS AN IBM MICRODRIVE, APART FROM A SMALL DRIVE MADE BY IBM?

The Microdrive really is a minute hard disk drive approximately 1" or so square and of After Eight Mint-like thickness. It doesn't actually rotate and hum continuously like its 3.5" brothers, preferring to be stirred into action as and when needed, rather more like a sealed-in floppy disk. It does however still contain an electric motor, the "pros and cons" of which I'll discuss later.

It is currently available in three storage sizes, which do not alter its physical dimensions, I might add. The capacities being 340 Megabyte, 512 Megabyte and current big brother, 1.0 Gigabyte!

Oh no, not another format war on the brink, I hear you cry. Worry not, IBM have given a lot of thought to that. If those dimensions I mentioned earlier sound familiar, it's because these drives are designed to be "bunged in the same 'ole" as Compact Flash II modules, one of the front-runners in digital camera storage.

This makes them immediately useful to most people whose kit is intended for CF II memory chips. There are one or two exceptions, and it's best to check that yours actually SAYS it's configured for the IBM's as well as CF II.

Of course, it's not just digital cameras that can now benefit from the serious capacity afforded by Microdrives. Some PDA's are now using them, as is my MP3 player.

THE COMPETITION

Currently, nothing else comes close to the 1.0 Gigabyte model, although I note that 512 Megabyte CF II chips can now be got. Price-wise, not a lot comes close though, since the BIG CF II chips are pretty expensive in a "pence per Megabyte"
kind of
way. The top end Microdrive weighs in at around 40p per Megaybte.

USING THAT CAPACITY

My current digital camera, a Casio with 3.34 mega pixel capacity is my main use for my pair of 340 Megabyte Microdrives. A year ago, these cost me more than I care to mention here, but heh, that's the way of things, right?

Even at top definition, the Casio creates 1.3 megabyte JPEG files, which gives me a massive 225 shots per drive, before swapping them over, and a 5 week tour of OZ last year proved this. I'm still wading through the 450 shots, trimming, re-aligning and turning them into a PowerPoint album, but that?s another story.

Always a sucker for a new gadget, I hanker after the new Nikon Coolpix 5700. This accepts CF II/Microdrives too - hmmm, what a coincidence!

However, the Nikon's 5-megapixel capacity and different amount of JPEG compression means that my 340 Megabyte jobs will "only" handle 138 shots at "top whack" but still more than enough to bore the pants off even the hardiest vicarious person.

DRAWBACKS

a) Possibly the worst feature of the Microdrive is precisely that they ARE hard drives, with that electric motor in them, that I mentioned earlier. This leads to higher battery consumption than you would expect to get from a CF II module, which are of course solid-state. So your are left with a dilemma, whether to go for the outright capacity of a 1.0 Gigabyte Microdrive, and worry about your battery life all afternoon, or buy the 512 Megabyte CF II module for even more money and less capacity, but not have to worry so much about your batteries! Tricky!

b) The electric motor "thing" could also point to their being less reliable, but all I can say is that I've had two for a year or so now, and they've been fine.

c) Without checking the full facts out first, I bought a Sandisk CF card reader for ease of use when downloading
shots to PC. No problems were experienced when downloading, but try to access the drives from Windows Explorer for anything else, like reformatting them, and you will be met with resistance. Whether the USB-linked Sandisk isn't up to driving all that continuous file activity, or whether it doesn't have a full pin-out to write to Microdrives is anyone's guess. It just goes to reinforce what I said about checking for FULL compatibility.

ACCESSORIES

If bought separately, i.e. not bundled with the camera, the drives often come with a PCMCIA card adapter, which means that the drives can be inserted into a laptop and operated as any other hard drive. You get a floppy of drivers to complete this particular set-up, and it seems to work just fine on my wife's laptop.

The drives come in a sturdy plastic pocket case for transit.

PRICES

These range from around £111 for the smallest to a shade over £200 for the largest. Still cheaper than the very largest CF II card, and twice the size!

The PCMCIA adapter can be had for £15 at Dabs.com

Summary: