Simpledrive Mini: 4GB microdrive for the masses

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Company: Simpletech Inc.
Product: Simpledrive Mini
Interface: USB 2.0
Size: 4 GB Street Price: $119 (Amazon.com / CompUSA)

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A MICRODRIVE used to be expensive, very expensive. Now, the competition with flash memory based devices and the appearance of new players in the storage market has made microdrive prices plummet.

Simpletech decided to enter the microdrives market and give the flash thumb drives some competition with its Simpledrive Mini, which at around $119 greenbacks at time of this writing is still $40 cheaper than a comparable compactflash-format Microdrive (like this one from Hitachi), and $157 greenbacks cheaper than a $276, 4 GB compactflash card from Sandisk.

Only 43 grams and slightly bigger than a small match box.

Some simple benchmarking
I used Passmark Performance Test v5.0 to measure the drive's speed, and the results showed that enabling write-back cache increases performance considerably, with the Passmark disk rating jumping from a score of 4.1 to 7.3. Sequential writes jumped from an abysmal 0.17 MBytes/sec to a more palatable 5.7Mbytes/sec, just after enabling the Write caching in the device's properties. Notice, though that if you enable "Optimize for performance" in WinXP, you need click on "eject" on the system tray before unplugging the drive so that cached data can be written back. Otherwise, data can be lost. Instead, if you want the maximum flexibility for quick removal, leave the configuration unmodified and endure the slower writes.

Passmark 5.0 results on WinXP SP2 with write caching disabled

Benchmark results with write cache enabled

Inside the guts

Inside: a microdrive from Cornice Inc.

Simpletech's device uses a microdrive manufactured in China by Cornice Inc., dubbed by the company a "storage element", and which apparently includes both the microdrive and a controlling IC chip (I was unable to identify the big D741649 chip, so I assume it's cornice's). USB-to-IDE bridging function is provided by an IT8903 from Taiwanese chip company ITE. There's little else worth noting on the circuit board, as the unit draws power from the USB bus.

Close up of the circuit board, showing USB-to-IDE bridge chip by ITE

98se? Linux? nobody uses those OSs, right?

One interesting note is that Simpletech decided that nobody is running Win98SE anymore. Well, my ancient Thinkpad 380ed is!. And the Simpledrive Mini looked like an excellent opportunity to backup ancient data I have there -and I assume this scenario is familiar to lots of people-. No luck, Simpletech's documentation says the Mini supports Windows ME onwards, and Mac OS-X, but no 98se. Why? Because the device relies on the USB 2.0 "mass storage" drivers built by Microsoft on WinME and later versions.

To make it work on 98SE, they'd have had to include their own drivers. And guess what, if you look at ITE's web page it says "The IT8903AE can operate in Win XP, Win 2000, Win ME, Mac OS 8.6 and above, and Linux OS without driver needed. It also can operate in Win 98SE with device driver.".

In fact I was able to plug it into a system running Linspire linux and the unit showed up just fine. So a bit of thumbs down to Simpletech for having a device that works with linux but not advertising it as such. About the lack of Win98SE drivers, I decided to contact chip maker ITE, and an Angel Lin kindly replied straight from Taiwan: "Dear Sir, Yes, we have IT8903 driver for Win98SE". However when I asked if they could e-mail the win98se driver to me (or an URL) I no longer heard back from them. I blame the holidays. Still, this doesn't excuse Simpletech for not including or offering such a 98se driver for download, if the chipset maker says one is available.

Documentation feels a bit rushed

Documentation is minimal and provided as a folded leaflet, basically telling you that "no drivers are needed" on all supported OSs (again, WinME onwards, Mac OS-X). I couldn't help noticing however that the printed leaflet says "Simpledrive Mini is formatted as a NTFS volume at the factory" ... "However Mac OS cannot write to NTFS formatted disks". So I went and looked at the drive properties on WinXP... it showed a FAT32 partition. Clearly someone at Simpletech changed his/her mind and they forgot to update the printed documentation.

Also, loading Partition Magic 8 showed a message stating that "the length of the partition of the partition table is incorrect", and offered to fix it. Afraid to break things, I left things as-is, and I suggest you do the same. It's quite possible that the SD Mini uses some area for internal error correction or some other data. I will let you know once I hear from Simpletech on this one. But let me stress that the drive has been working fine for about a month moving data back and forth for about a month, so this seems to be a non-issue, or a quick by PQMagic.

The Verdict

The only serious downside I can see on this unit is that the internal microdrive is not a compactflash unit. In other words, you can't open the enclosure, remove the microdrive and insert it into a CF/Microdrive ready digital camera or mp3 player. But of course, that's not what the manufacturer intended. The SD Mini was designed to move data back and forth between PCs, and it serves that purpose just fine.

I give the Simpledrive Mini three and a half Fernandos in my personal one-to-five rating scale (or 7/10 if you wish). It's a good drive at a great price, useful for carrying in a pocket and moving A LOT of data around, with a few limitations listed above. I'd have given it 4/5 if it included Win98SE drivers, and probably 5.0 if it mentioned linux as a supported OS, since it does work with the penguin OS.µ