Seagate's Photo Hard Drives are true microdrives

TWO MONTHS AGO, I wrote an article about Seagate's impressive product launches in the microdrive market, and how they had a pricing edge over most competitors, see Seagate makes waves in microdrive market. A few questions remained, however, about the company's decision to label those microdrives as "Photo Storage Hard Drive".

Back then I wrote: "while Hitachi microdrives are known to operate in "true-ide" mode, Seagate is suspiciously silent on whether these inexpensive microdrives operate in both memory and "true-ide" modes, or just "memory mode" for digital camera compatibility. Spokespersons at spinning disc giant Seagate have been contacted about the "true ide" enigma, and I'm sure we'll hear from them soon". Well, after some e-mail bounces caused by cyberspace hiccups, I finally got the confirmation from Seagate's spokespersons: the Seagate "Photo Hard Drives" are in fact full microdrives, capable of operating both in "True IDE" and "Memory mode".

Seagate's Colleen Rodriguez told the INQ: "The Seagate 8GB CompactFlash Photo Hard Drives are sold in the retail market support both the "True-IDE" and "Memory" modes of the CompactFlash interface. They can be used in music players, PDAs and digital cameras alike". This would indicate that it'd be possible not only to use them on digital gadgets but also to boot an OS from them by hooking up an inexpensive (passive) CF-to-IDE adapter like this one or these, to your PC's IDE port.

She also added: "the ST1 hard drives (also 8GB in capacity) are targeted at the Embedded market, and are not the ones we retail as Photo Drives. These are shipped to OEMs and only support the "True-IDE" mode. Also, our next generation hard drives, the ST1.3 Series (12GB), are targeted towards the embedded applications market -do not have a compact flash connector- and support only the IDE interface, that is similar to the True-IDE part of the Compact Flash Interface".

So now you know. Seagate's "Photo Hard Drives" are true compactflash microdrives capable of working on IDE and memory modes just like Hitachi's, which makes Seagate's attractive pricing even more compelling. Stay tuned for an upcoming review. µ

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Seagate makes waves in microdrive market