Cold weather and micro-drive

Hi,

Will be visiting parts of Canada soon, and wondering if cold weather will cause any problems with my micro-drive. Would it be better to use a regular compact flash in that climate?

Yes, it will if you're going to be out for long. Moving parts tend to bind more in the cold and your battery's going to fade sooner regardless of what it's trying to write to.

Some may not want to hear it, but, there are several reasons to use flash drives. And now-a-days it so cheap I can't see going any other way.

Microdrives are only rated down to around 32 degrees faranheit (same as many of the Canon DSLRs btw), but many CompactFlash memory cards are rated down to below zero faranheit (-13F for the SanDisk Extremes).

I have used IBM and Hitachi microdrives in winter conditions with no problems, but a Sony I had was so slow in cold weather that it was unuseable. Generally I use Sandisk Extreme CF cards, but if those get filled up at a ski race I switch to the microdrives I carry for back up capacity.