Which is better: Microdrive or flash memory?

MANY DIFFERENT devices - music players, portable video players, USB hard drives -- are being built around one inch microdrives being produced by Fujitsu, Hitachi, MagicStor, Toshiba, and others. These miniaturised hard drives hold between two to five GB, with data transfer rates around 4.2 to 7.9 MB/second and average seek times between 10 to 12 milliseconds in form factors of around 43mm (1.7") x 36mm (1.4") x 5mm (0.19") - in other words, Compact Flash Type II packaging.

So just how reliable are microdrives? Interestingly, no one has published a microdrive "torture test" and there might be good reason for the lapse if the lads down at the local camera store aren't pulling my leg. One of their customers bought a pair of 4GB microdrive to drop into his high-quality Canon SLR and planned to use them one crisp spring morning in downtown Washington D.C. to take pictures of the Japanese ambassador in front of the flowering Cherry Blossoms trees. Microdrive #1 didn't work, so he figured it was a one-off hardware problem and went to microdrive #2. It wouldn't work either. Off to the flash memory!

The camera store lads say microdrives don't handle extremes of heat and cold too well and the drives had been sitting out in the trunk of his frost-covered car that morning. If this hypothesis is true, there should be stories of iPod Minis dying in places in bitterly frigid places like Minnesota and Alaska as well as hot places like Iraq and Kuwait. Of course, submitting an iPod to such temperature extremes might kill the battery as well as the hard drive.

If you are an extreme climber, not having enough air pressure can hinder microdrive operations. As reported by Steve's Digicam's website here, IBM's technical support says their microdrive may have problems above 9,000 feet, so if you are climbing Mt. Fuji (13,000+ feet) or Mt. Rainier (14,400 feet), you may be out of luck even if you keep the drive warm.

Compare this to the various abuses that people have put (flash) memory keys and cards through. Digital Camera Shopper brutalised various forms of memory cards, as documented by the Beeb here. Memory cards were dunked in coffee, dipped in cola, and run through a dishwasher. Everything from old-fashioned SmartMedia and CompactFlash through xD and Secure Digital cards held up without a hitch. (None of the media fared as well in more brutal tests with a sledgehammer and being nailed to a tree).

While Digital Camera Shopper's tests were by no means fully scientific, the lads at SlashDot quickly posted their own unofficial endurance tests. One user had dropped his 128MB memory key in hot coffee twice and put it through the washing machine three times. Another had put a Compact Flash through the washing machine and dryer no worse for wear, with only some label damage. Finally, one animal lover had seen one memory card attacked by his cat and another carried around in the mouth of a dog for several hours before being buried in the back yard without trouble.

If durability isn't an issue and you treat your gizmos with a certain amount of respect and tender love - that is, never drop them and always keep them at a comfy room temperature - then overall cost or absolute storage capacity might play a more of a role in deciding between flash and microdrive devices. One GB flash, either SD or Compact Flash memory, is running as low as $60 (Lexar Media, with rebate discounts through CompUSA), with 1GB USB keys from several manufacturers running in the range of $100, give or take a few dollars. A USB 2.0 hard drive built around the Seagate ST1 5 GB microdrive lists at $159.99 through TigerDirect - around $32/GB.

Moving a step up to the gizmo level, the Rio Carbon MP3 player uses the ST1 drive and lists at $249.99; people desperate for a 5GB CompactFlash drive for their digital camera habits are buying the Rio Carbon and stripping out the SD1. In comparison, different model 1 GB flash memory MP3 players list between $180-250. It's a pretty safe bet to say they'll be some aggressive price cutting on flash memory and devices built around flash in the next six months so they can get some separation from microdrive-based devices. µ