Microdrives.

[michaeladawson]

Here's Rob Galbraith's CF page for CF to computer transfers.

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=6007-6133

You have to compare apples to apples. Look at the Lexar numbers. An 80x card is nowhere near twice as fast as a 40x card. Around 10 Mb/s as compared with 7 Mb/s.

The SanDisk Extreme III is very fast at 12.9 Mb/s. I don't know what this card is. Is it 80x? 100x? 120x? If you compare it with a slower SanDisk card which would that be? The SanDisk Ultra II is around 11 Mb/s. Is that a 40x card? 80x?

And what's the price differential? For those that actually need the speed then by all means plop down the cash for faster cards. For many the higher price is wasted money that could be better spent on other accessories.

Check out his other CF pages for performance numbers writing to disk for specific cameras.

 

[rabbit601]

Thanks Keith I really appreciate your input. It all seems to make sense to a novice to a novice to me.

 

[DesDrury]

Anyone have any suggestions/comments about using a Microdrive Card
on a D200. If not what would you suggest as a really good/fast CF
card?

Hi,

I've been using 4 microdrives since I first purchased my D100, 3.5 years ago. In that time I have captured tens of thousands of frames and can't recall every loosing a single one due to the hard disk. During that time I've also had friends with new/newish CF cards loose every single image due to some failure.

The only time I ever had a problem is when I had my D100 lens wedged into the window opening of a helicoptor whilst photographing Mahe and surrounding islands. The vibration kept the D100 from writing its buffer out to the hard disk on multiple occassions and was a bit of a lesson to me. For high vibration work you definitely need solid state. However, after some initial concern about the Microdrive, it has continued to function for another year without missing a beat.

I'm not saying for a minute that Microdrives are better than CF. There is no way they are, but they have proven to me to be reliable and thats whats counts the most as far as I'm concerned.

BTW, I spoke to my dealer yesterday and I will have my D200 in my hands next Friday or Saturday (No 1. on his list) and yes I will be using my microdrives with it

Cheers.

Des

heli

 

[spinellino]

A few days ago I lost a 2Gb microdrive while shooting at side of a road. I noticed that I lost it only hours later. Since the card was full of pictures I decided to try and find it. I was VERY lucky and I managed to find the card.

It was in the middle of the wet road at 0°C and from the signs it has I can tell one or more cars went over it. But the thing still works!

Having said that I will buy a solid state CF card for my D200, since the Microdrive is not fast enough.
--



http://www.marcospinelli.com
http://www.spinelli.tk

 

[Gareth]

LOVE these comments, since the same people think thier desktop hard drive will not crash. LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For the record I have a 1 GB MD that has out lived 3 cameras and 4 desktop HD. I would gamble on a MD before a camera and desktop.

Simply put… If you want to risk your photos to save a few bucks
then buy a microdrive.

No doubt they work most of the time, but are not as dependable as a
device that has no moving parts. With the current cost of CF cards
I see no reason to use one.

 

[J. Bne]

Can someone explain me ...?

If MD's are so fragile, how come they are used in millions of MP3 players which get dragged, jogged, hiked, flewn, canoed ? etc... all over the world

Or are people more carefull with an mp3 player than a DSLR ? Surely not I would think ...

J. Bne

 

[Klaas de Baas]

Seems strange...
These fast cards are not so fast?

I offload a full 1GB microdrive to a Compactrdrive 70x in less than 4 minutes... Mind you, this one is an old IBM drive, bought with my D100 when they first came out. I shoot NEFs, but i doubt if that improves speed... The computer, an old Compaq PIII-500 with a Sitecom USB2 i/f, takes about the same time... A 2 GB lexar is a bit faster, but if your system teakes 30 mins to offload 1 GB, the cardspeed doesn't matter much, does it?

Klaas.

 

[Ursus]

Seems strange...
These fast cards are not so fast?
I offload a full 1GB microdrive to a Compactrdrive 70x in less than
4 minutes... Mind you, this one is an old IBM drive, bought with my
D100 when they first came out. I shoot NEFs, but i doubt if that
improves speed... The computer, an old Compaq PIII-500 with a
Sitecom USB2 i/f, takes about the same time... A 2 GB lexar is a
bit faster, but if your system teakes 30 mins to offload 1 GB, the
cardspeed doesn't matter much, does it?

Actually it's 5 gigs in 30 minutes..and that includes card swap time and such.

--
-----Bear

 

[Ursus]

For the offload time, I wasn't using the chart numbers - I was using what I measured on my computer.
--
-----Bear

 

[Steve Bingham]

. . . I suspect, the D200. SanDisk or Lexar's latest would be my recommendation. We are talking a very large speed difference here between the fastest CF cards and a microdrive.
--
Steve Bingham
http://www.dustylens.com

 

[Photosaab]

I had a 1GB drive go into the ocean with my first D100 when I was on vacation in Maine, it was fished out later that day.

My D100 was dead (luckly it was insured and had a new one shipped to me the next day from ny) but the micro drive survived and i did not loose any images!! I was quite surprised and VERY happy.

 

[Ursus]

The debate between microdrives and CF cards is actually in a lot of ways similar to the debates between Windows and Mac OS and also the debates around Nioon versus Canon.

People have different experiences. People have differing amounts of money to spend.

I will say that when Hitachi cleaned up the design on the microdrive after they bought the disk business from IBM. One of the things was to make them less sensitive to being squeezed.

I'm sticking with CF cards for my own reasons and the fact that CF cards are currently faster than the microdrives. (At least in the 2GB size.)
--
-----Bear

 

[Ray Ritchie]

I bought a 1 GB Microdrive with my D100 three years ago as the most cost-effective way to jump start my storage needs at that time, and that card (IBM/ Hitachi) is still going strong. However, it does drain the battery significantly quicker than CF cards do, so now I have 3 CF cards that I use as my "first preference", and turn to the Microdrive only when those are full.

I agree with many of the other posters who have indicated that, while the specs on Microdrives for R/W speed and MTBF may be inferior to state-of-the art CF, it probably makes little difference in practice, since both of these stats are generally better than the specs of the DSLR itself. If I were buying a new D200 (and I may do that sometime during the coming year), I'd probably get a large Microdrive with it, just so I could roughly double my storage capacity without a major additional shock to the bank account.

Ray Ritchie

 

[Question_Man]

You missed the point.

I want the MOST dependable storage solution in my camera. It’s not that Microdrives are so bad – they are just not as dependable or rugged as a CF card.

Sure cameras and hard drives can fail… and that is why I always carry a spare body and backup my hard drive. The CF card is the only time that all my images are on one storage device and that is why I want the most dependable device I can get.

For the record I have a 1 GB MD that has out lived 3 cameras and 4
desktop HD. I would gamble on a MD before a camera and desktop.

Simply put… If you want to risk your photos to save a few bucks
then buy a microdrive.

No doubt they work most of the time, but are not as dependable as a
device that has no moving parts. With the current cost of CF cards
I see no reason to use one.

 

[sfisher]

What it comes down to is:

Do microdrives fail more often? Maybe, but not that I've been able to tell in 5-6 years of using them for many thousands of shots. I suspect with normal usage the MTBF is probably pretty close to Flash Cards.

Are microdrives slower? Yes, but how fast do you really need it to be? The new generation of cameras have a fairly deep buffer. You can shoot all day and never fill it. If you don't fill the buffer then the card speed (in camera doesn't matter) The buffer on my d2x empties to my microdrive fast enough that I rarely notice it.

Can you fill the buffer and have to wait? Yes but you have to shooting a sustained burst of pictures for quite some time, before the actual write speed to the card will matter. I suppose you can do this, if you are shooting sports, and certain action photography. Then by all means buy the fastest card you can. On the other hand the "bang for the buck" is with the microdrive, you can get 2-3 times the GBs for the price of a High Speed Flash Card

Are they slower downloading to a computer? Maybe a bit, but not so you'd notice for most purposes. If it takes me 10 minutes to download a 4 GB microdrive, I'd be surprised. Again if you really need the speed then go for the High Speed Card.

The point is, it really depends on what you can afford, and what your shooting need is. I'd bet for about 80% of us, it really wouldn't matter with Today's high buffer capacity cameras.

 

[rabbit601]

Anyone have any suggestions/comments about using a Microdrive Card
on a D200. If not what would you suggest as a really good/fast CF
card?

Hi,

I've been using 4 microdrives since I first purchased my D100, 3.5
years ago. In that time I have captured tens of thousands of
frames and can't recall every loosing a single one due to the hard
disk. During that time I've also had friends with new/newish CF
cards loose every single image due to some failure.

The only time I ever had a problem is when I had my D100 lens
wedged into the window opening of a helicoptor whilst photographing
Mahe and surrounding islands. The vibration kept the D100 from
writing its buffer out to the hard disk on multiple occassions and
was a bit of a lesson to me. For high vibration work you
definitely need solid state. However, after some initial concern
about the Microdrive, it has continued to function for another year
without missing a beat.

I'm not saying for a minute that Microdrives are better than CF.
There is no way they are, but they have proven to me to be reliable
and thats whats counts the most as far as I'm concerned.

BTW, I spoke to my dealer yesterday and I will have my D200 in my
hands next Friday or Saturday (No 1. on his list) and yes I will be
using my microdrives with it

Cheers.

Des

heli

I am totally envious now since I'm on a waiting list a mile long and probably won't get my camera until the end of Janurary. I hope you have great success with it and let me know how you like it.

Good Luck and thanks for the reply.

 

[Osku]

As I wrote abowe, so how can something that is faster than the fasted be slower than needed?

340MB and 1GB Microdrives were here some years ago. Now you have to compare 4, 6 and 8 GB models, and rather the new 6 and 8 GB with shock proof techonogy (was it 2000 G or 4000 G, see the Hitachi page in my link above...).

How can anyone compare 4 yrs old Microdrive to current CF cards? I can say that current 3k8 Microdrive is 10M/s and CF cards are 1-2M/s if I compare to 4 yrs old CF cards... that is as truthfull as the other way round.

But possibly the storage is now just cheap enough so that it does not matter to most anymore. I want bigger storage, and 8GB is 4 times more than 2GB and double the 4GB. With 20MB RAW files there is a difference.

... is pretty much the fastest CF card out there, allowing a little
more than one image (@ 10 MP) per second transfer rate. This
should be more than enough even for the 5fps burst rate expected
with the D200 (because of the buffer).
Expect to pay about 100 USD per GB before rebates (for instance, at
B&H or similar reseller). Hard to beat.
The Micro-Drives, even though they used to be the capacity
standard-bearer, tend to be slower (although I've not seen exactly
how much slower). Also, because micro-drives are hard drives, the
risk of failure is a bit higher than with flash media.

I'd go with fast CF media for the D200.
I've had one 1G micro-drive and 3 512M CF's, but will buy larger
cards very soon...

--
Osku

 

[dannv]

see my other posts about theory vs implementation. without something more analytical than "i think air cushions and moving parts are bad" i can't add much to that conversation.

as a high volume user, i can confirm CF failure rates are not as much lower than MD as many people like to believe. one final time: for high volume storage needs, MD $ performance exceeds CF...dav
--
don't wait for technology -- it won't wait for you

 

[RRRoger]

--
RRRoger

I've been using microdrives since 1999 Each new version is faster. I now use hitachi 6GB drives. I have tried many Sandisk and the 80x Lexar flash cards in my D1 to D2x cameras and they are not noticeably any faster. They are so narrow and slippery that I cannot remove the flash cards with my bare hands. I am hopping for better flash card performance in the D200 as some cameras are optimized for high speed compact flash.

 

[RRRoger]

--
RRRoger

6yrs and millions of pictures on a dozen microdrives and no problems at all except when I tried to format in a different type of camera than the one used.

I am in the market for 8-10 gb microdrives. Who has them for sale?