Seagate makes waves in microdrive market

SPINNING DISC giant Seagate, the same company that a few months ago snapped rival spinning disc firm Maxtor for $1.9b started shipping 8GB microdrives back in June. Today, a quick review of prices at online retail giant Amazon.com shows Seagate is doing some serious kicking in this market, and their microdrives currently sport the best price per gigabyte, breaking the $20/GB barrier and leaving offers from competitors like Magicstor and Hitachi in the dust.

The flash manufacturers are likely to fight tooth and nail for the growing "small/portable storage" market, and with companies like JVC offering home and even semi-pro video camcorders sporting compactflash slots -like this Everio model which includes a 4GB microdrive allowing two hours of mpeg2 video - the fight is surely going to get brutal.

A random sample, of 4GB -and below- kit:

Storage kit	Interface	Type	Capacity (GB)	Amazon.com price ***	Price/GB
Magicstor 2.2GB (**)	CF	Microdrive	2.2	$90	$40.90
Sandisk 4GB	CF	Flash Mem	4	$128	$32
Simpletech SD Mini (*)	USB 2.0	Microdrive	4	$119	$29.75
Seagate 4GB MD	CF	Microdrive	4	$80	$20

8-GB kit:

Storage kit	Interface	Type	Capacity (GB)	Amazon.com price ***	Price/GB
Simpletech 8GB	CF	Flash Mem	8	$414	$51.75
Iomega Micro Mini *	USB 2.0	Microdrive	8	$165	$20.62
Seagate 8GB MD	CF	Microdrive	8	$149	$18.62

* USB devices are pc-bound and offer less functionality than CF devices,
these were included in the table for storage-per-dollar cost perspective only.
** 4GB Magicstor microdrives not available at web retailer at time of this writing.
*** Prices are known to fluctuate with the tides
This is casual observation of prices on a single particular seller, limited to a handful selection
of devices at the time of this writing. It doesn't mean any of the mentioned companies might not
 have lower prices, higher capacities, etc available on other web retailers, or in the future.

And if this wasn't enough, the company announced one week ago their upcoming 12GB microdrive which I'm sure will only increase the heat on the competition. However, these ironically "huge microdrives" won't be available until the third quarter this year. The 8GB models currently available run at 3600 RPM and feature a 2MB cache. According to the company, your digital devices must support FAT32 to use the large capacity microdrives.

A personal thought here if you allow me: I think it's kind of sad that the industry can't rally behind any other, patent-free file system for digital storage. After all, consumers are used to installing heaps of bundled apps after they buy new kit for their Windows PCs, so installing a FS windows driver along the apps would go almost unnoticed. The use of the patented FAT32 by all sorts of gadgets only means more money unnecessarily going the way of the Evil Empire of Redmondia.

Of course, some people prefer the rugged, almost indestructible flash memory in some of the many flavours available - compactflash, SD, Transflash, memory stick etc. but Flash memory has its own achilles heel which is a limited write-life. That's why anyone booting an OS from a thumb drive without first disabling the pagefile or swap file is almost suicidal, as the repeated write operations are likely to kill it very quickly.

The compactflash devices, -at least those that comply with the original CF specs- have the possibility to function in two modes: memory card and "true ide". In true ide mode, the device becomes 100% compatible with a standard IDE hard drive, down to the electrical connection level. That's why you can buy an inexpensive passive adapter that connects a CF slot on a desktop computer to the IDE, parallel-ATA connector in a desktop PC's motherboard and then boot from any CF storage unit (that supports true-ide mode) seamlessly, whether those are microdrives with compactflash connector or CF flash memory cards. Sandisk CF cards are known to support "true-IDE" mode, and in the microdrive market, Hitachi units do as well.

You can see now why having a 8gb microdrive that you can carry in your shirt pocket AND not only use it in your digital camera or mp3 player but also boot your OS from it -without the writing-life limitation of CF flash memory- suddenly becomes attractive. But 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. The fact that they call it "Photo Storage hard drive" and not just microdrive makes me think that these drives are not true-ide compatible microdrives like Hitachi's.

Nevertheless, if you're in the market for a microdrive for your digital camera, the Seagate 8GB one gives the larger gigabytes per buck ratio. Spokespersons at spinning disc giant Seagate have been contacted about the "true ide" enigma, and I'm sure we'll hear from them soon. Once I get a reply you'll read about it here, because INQuiring minds want to know. In the meantime, isn't it ironic to think about all the things you can do with just a one-inch one? µ

See Also
Authopsy of a Microdrive
Seagate video touting their Microdrive's alleged endurance
Compactflash's "True IDE" and "memory mode" discussed

*NB while researching this story I became aware of the lack of freely available information about the microdrive market "horse race" and the respective market share of each player for 2005. I'd appreciate you send any links you find my way.