FlyingPete
3rd of July 2005 (Sun), 22:38
OK rant time, watch out!
Microdrives vs Solid State.
It seems that every time this topic comes up, a fairly large proportion of people chime in about the issues of reliability and sometimes the performance of Microdrives.
Where does your information come from, personal experience, assumptions or your heard it somewhere? I believe there is a lot of misinformation out there.
I had an interesting conversation at a local shop about Microdrives, the guy there was making negative statements, but was unable to back any up with real examples, it seemed he had also heard somewhere.
Time to separate fact from fiction. My personal experience is I used a 1GB Microdrive for a time in a borrowed D60 a few years ago, and spend quite a bit of time at the New Zealand importer of these drives, and this is what I know:
- The 1GB Microdrive I used had a tendency to slow down as it reached capacity, but this was the original 1GB, the current ones are considerably better
- The importer has sold well over 10000 of these in New Zealand with only one returned
- I have meet quite a few people who own them through my travels, not one has had any problems with them
- The engineering specifications for the Microdrives actually exceed those of solid state cards in all but two area, high G vibration (more vibration that I would want to be subject to!) and operational altitude
- If they were so bad, surely there would be more information about actual bad experiences (such as the 2.2GB Magistor, plenty of first hand stuff about those) around, not just hearsay
- There are plenty of real stories about losses from Solid State cards, but we don’t bash those (this is probably affected by the populations of both though)
- No moving parts doesn’t mean it won’t break, one of my team dropped their CF card (solid state) earlier in the year from just over a meter, he lost all the data, and it became unusable (no real signs of damage on the outside)
OK so does anyone where have any first hand bad experiences with Microdrives? No I heard somewhere.... stuff.
I have just gone through the process of buying one, and in the end opted out, not because I though they were risky, just that I thought there was a more cost effective way of increasing capacity.
End Rant.
Microdrives vs Solid State.
It seems that every time this topic comes up, a fairly large proportion of people chime in about the issues of reliability and sometimes the performance of Microdrives.
Where does your information come from, personal experience, assumptions or your heard it somewhere? I believe there is a lot of misinformation out there.
I had an interesting conversation at a local shop about Microdrives, the guy there was making negative statements, but was unable to back any up with real examples, it seemed he had also heard somewhere.
Time to separate fact from fiction. My personal experience is I used a 1GB Microdrive for a time in a borrowed D60 a few years ago, and spend quite a bit of time at the New Zealand importer of these drives, and this is what I know:
- The 1GB Microdrive I used had a tendency to slow down as it reached capacity, but this was the original 1GB, the current ones are considerably better
- The importer has sold well over 10000 of these in New Zealand with only one returned
- I have meet quite a few people who own them through my travels, not one has had any problems with them
- The engineering specifications for the Microdrives actually exceed those of solid state cards in all but two area, high G vibration (more vibration that I would want to be subject to!) and operational altitude
- If they were so bad, surely there would be more information about actual bad experiences (such as the 2.2GB Magistor, plenty of first hand stuff about those) around, not just hearsay
- There are plenty of real stories about losses from Solid State cards, but we don’t bash those (this is probably affected by the populations of both though)
- No moving parts doesn’t mean it won’t break, one of my team dropped their CF card (solid state) earlier in the year from just over a meter, he lost all the data, and it became unusable (no real signs of damage on the outside)
OK so does anyone where have any first hand bad experiences with Microdrives? No I heard somewhere.... stuff.
I have just gone through the process of buying one, and in the end opted out, not because I though they were risky, just that I thought there was a more cost effective way of increasing capacity.
End Rant.