Microdrive reliability

The conventional logic on this forum seems to be that microdrives are inherently unreliable and should be avoided in favour of solid state compact flash cards.

I understand and agree with the logic behind this.

For me however, theory doesn’t seem to match with reality. I own three microdrives, two of which have been very heavily used over a period of nearly 3 years now (I would estimate one has done @27,000 images and one has done @50,000 images) without a single problem. They’ve been dropped and suffered the same lack of care as my solid state cards get and they are still going strong.

Now, leaving aside the horrid MagicStor things which we all know don’t work in Canon dSLRs, how many real cases of microdrive failure have you personally had?

Cadwell:

I agree with you...obviously I do becuase I just bought a 4gig Microdrive myself. I think there might have been reliability issues at one point with the earliest units, and then there was the problem with the 2.2G drives sold by Magicstor that had a lot of problems. I'm quite satisfied that they are much better now than they used to be.

On the other hand, I only use the microdrive when I think there's a good chance I might need the extra capacity. Otherwise, I use a 1-gig CF card.

I have had one. I bought a camera online from Ebay and it came with a 340 mb IBM microdrive... I have no idea how it has been used in the past, but it appeared clean and in working order. Anyway, I took about 200 shots with it over the period of a few days. When I went to put the microdrive in my reader, it worked fine. However, I tried yanking it out of the device when the little light was still on (but no pictures were transferring). The next time I tried putting the microdrive in, it clicked, whirred, and died. (the death was accompanied by a repetitive, sickening siren-like whisper coming from inside the drive). While I know that pulling a card out of a drive is not recommended with first "shutting down the drive" in windows, I have never encountered ANY problems from yanking out solid state CF cards or USB pendrives. They don't completely BREAK. The worst warning you can get from the company is that there will be a "loss of data," which of course i've never encountered...the whole thing shouldn't shut down and die! They suck! Don't buy a microdrive.

That's just my two sense.

I love the way that people manage to generalise from a sample of one.

Don't play frisbee with MDs or CFs and don't "yank" them out of the drive.

And don't use the 340 meg MDs - they had a lot more problems reported than the 1 gig version ever did.

My two 1gig IBM MDs (the oldest more than 3 years old) still appear (fingers crossed) to be working fine.

Regards,

I used to be in the "pro-microdrive" camp, until my recent vacation.

I have had a 1GB Hitachi/IBM microdrive since last December. It initially received light use, and then I bought a 512MB CF card as a "spare." This spare became my primary card. Since my laptop is almost always nearby, I was always able to download shots off the CF card before needing additional storage.

A few weeks ago I went on a cruise to Alaska. Up at Hubbard Glacier, I kept shooting and filled up the CF card. Took out the microdrive and almost filled that up )over 100 RAW shots).

As we were leaving Hubbard, I went back to my room and downloaded all the pics. Per my usual routine, I put the card back in the camera and reformat to celar the card.

When I did this, the mircodrive just made some "whirring" sounds and the camera gave an error message. Tried putting it back in the card reader, and wouldn't mount.

Bottom line - card is dead. I almost had a heart attack, thinking I lost my whole day of shooting. Forntunately, the pictures were downloaded before the card died.

This is a card that received light use, was never dropped, mishandled or exposed to extreme conditions. No idea why it decided to go.

I am now a convert. I will probably not even use the replacement I hope to get through warranty. I no longer trust the technology.

I have two 1Gb MDs which have never had problems (knock on wood). But I also added CFs over time as prices dropped and don't really use the MDs any more.

As I recall, the issues that early digital camera users complained about regarding Microdrives were:

* slower read/write times
* moving parts (vs. CF cards being solid state), which can break over time
* potential for problems when used at higher altitudes (don't exactly remember why)
* reliability problems with 340Mb drives (mentioned previously)

Microdrives are cool!

But microdrives are cool! They have metal casing and
screws, seem much more real than an overpriced
chip cased in cheap plastic!

Cadenza wrote:
But microdrives are cool! They have metal casing and
screws, seem much more real than an overpriced
chip cased in cheap plastic!

Gee, I'd even more like to have the steam-powered version

Let's get serious ... I have two microdrives, one I bought with my G2 2 years ago and the other one i got from my company to back up the mailfile from my laptop.

I haven't had problems with either of them so far, apart from the plastic encasing (actually more like adhesive tape) coming off from the newer of the two.

However - whenever I see the remark 'Do not touch here!!!' 'Do not seal the hole!!!' I feel that it is a rather delicate device and that I or somebody else using my camera might one day accidentally destroy it (e.g. drop it, yank it out or else).

Bottom line: nowadays I wouldn't go that route again. Solid state CF cards are so cheap now that the Microdrive does not pose any real advantages - at least not to me.

Best regards,
Andy

I used a microdrive (IBM 1 Gig) heavily for 2.5 years, with no problems. I handled it with care, although there was the occasional drop (nothing severe).

Then it died, for no apparent reason, with no obvious event triggering the failure. I had to retake a few shots, but I was lucky.

At the time I purchased it in 2001 or so, there was better than a factor of two in available storage and price; today, that advantage has disappeared.

For me, the bottom line is that hard drives will eventually fail, and most likely take everything on the drive. I don't know the failure modes for CF drives, but I would expect better reliability. I hate the risk of losing everything all at once!

BTW - hard drives DO have an altitude limit, because the heads in the HD "fly" just above the disk surface. If the air pressure is to low, the probability of failure goes up.

RSS

I am amazed at how sturdy the MDs are!

Sure there are stories of lossed data.. by I don't see any trend towards more MD loos than CF.. in fact the opposite.. the ONLY time I saw a trend was Spring of 2003... at that time on this forum there was a large number of problems with Sandisk standard CF cards..

Since then the Sandisk trend has disappeared to.

I think the biggest issue for the MD is the "potential" seems to be higher.. just based on moving parts.

I've had (2) 1GB MDs going on 3 years now. Several times they have been knocked of the desk (cats! :mad and taken on hikes over 14,000 feet elevation. So far so good.... not a single failure. Got my fingers crossed.

The only issue I've had with them is the write speed. Once the 10D buffer is full it seems to take an agonizing amount of time for it to clear. The 1DM2 improved that situation.

No regrets on the microdrives here.

I've got an old original IBM 340 MB microdrive that I've had over three years.. I got it with an old Canon Pro90IS I once owned. I currently use the drive in my pocket PC.. It gets a lot of use. I've dropped the thing a few times. No problems.....

On the other hand.. I just had a Lexar 512MB CF card go bad on me.

No problem with 1G MD for 2 years.

no probs with my 4g card. used for 7 months and have about 6000 images thru it..

i love it. the freedom of not having to worry about running out of space!!

If I shouldn't use 340 mb drives because they have problems, why should I risk a lot of money on other faulty drives? It's like Ford saying, "Well, the Taurus has a lot of problems. Don't buy it, but feel free to look at our other models." Riiight.

I've had experience with all sorts of USB, CF, and SD devices. The only one which completely failed when I yanked it out of the computer was the MD. That says something.