Are MicroDrives Dead?

Been a while since I have seen a CF style MicroDrive. I wonder if flash technology surpassed it? The biggest MD I ever saw was 8GB, Flash is now available at 32GB, with 64GB just around the corner!

I will miss the good old 'if you sneeze while holding the card you will loose everything' arguments. The fact was the environmental limits were close to standard flash.

Perhaps it is just more cost effective to use flash nowadays?

Pretty much, yes. I see no reason to buy or use a microdrive instead of a regular CF card. They're slow, unreliable, and not particularly cheap.

Flash grew faster than demand. I see a few nails in the microdrive coffin. -Like you mentioned, size. How many need more than 32gig? -Flash is now significantly faster than microdrives. -The price of Flash has fallen to the point I doubt they could make microdrives more cost effective. And, the old microdrive issue, it needs more power would still exist.

If they're not dead, they will be.

I bought one a few years ago, it was very expensive and it only
lasted a few months. It went in the trash.

I've got a 6GB Hitachi that I picked up on a clearance sale for around $25. I've been using it for the past 7 months or so, and have never had a problem. I've heard a few horror stories, but no issues for me as of yet. I format it each time I pull the images off.

Its slow, but for the price, its works well enough.

Ralph Merlino wrote in post #5749461
I bought one a few years ago, it was very expensive and it only
lasted a few months. It went in the trash.

I have a Hitachi MD that I bought in 2005 for $279.99 I actually used it a few weeks ago for a few shots and it still worked.

YEs, I believe the microdrive is basically dead. Hitachi made some good design changes over the IBM drives, but they were stil CF2 (most cameras can take the thicker drive), they are more fragile, and have lost the advantages they used to hold over solid state memory.

It used to be a 4g microdrive was about 2/3 the cost of a solid state version of the card - it also had faster read and write times. The technology of the microdrive was nearly maxxed out, while there have been huge leaps in the speed and capicity of the solid state cards.

I didn't know it was ever alive. It was so expensive a few years ago and since CF card prices were coming down not many people bought the drive.

goldboughtrue wrote in post #5755463
I didn't know it was ever alive. It was so expensive a few years ago and since CF card prices were coming down not many people bought the drive.

My analysis of the situation also. For a few photographers they were an asset, but how many of us cannot (safely) change cards from where we are? How many of us actually Need multiple Gigabytes of in camera memory, yes it is very nice, but NEED? With my 40D a one Gig card holds 57 Raw + large Jpegs. That is almost the equivalent of one 1 and 1/2 rolls of 36 exposure film, which was the ancient large capacity standard (and yes I know about bulk film backs).

Wayne

Mine was a IBM and I paid $350.00 for it. When it went bad after only
a few months I brought it back to the camera store where I bought it,
the owner of the store called IBM about the problem however IBM would
not stand behind it. That was the last product that I will ever buy from
IBM.

They suck. I bought one and a dew weeks later it stopped working. If not in use, it sat in my bag and you're not suppose to shake them up at all. Very fragile things...

I think they are! I would never buy or trust one.

I still have the original one that came with my D30 from back in 2001. Still works flawlessly... But it's quite slow and of limited capacity. Wouldn't bother with them, honestly - it has moving parts, CF does not. So the latter is faster and more reliable, not to mention cheaper.

So in a nutshell, are they dead? I don't know that they ever were alive to begin with! They were quickly outpaced by CF in size/speed/cost.

I bought 2 from woot.com about a year ago for 5 dollars each.
I use them:
-At airshows. I'll shoot my static shots on them. If I lost one; it's not the end of the world.
-If I've used up my 16 gigs of CF cards. If I've gotten to this point; it's near the end of the day anyway and I shouldn't be putting a ton on them.

My approach is I have them and sometimes use them; but don't rely on them for 'that shot' or for speed.

WMS wrote in post #5755675
My analysis of the situation also. For a few photographers they were an asset, but how many of us cannot (safely) change cards from where we are? How many of us actually Need multiple Gigabytes of in camera memory, yes it is very nice, but NEED? With my 40D a one Gig card holds 57 Raw + large Jpegs. That is almost the equivalent of one 1 and 1/2 rolls of 36 exposure film, which was the ancient large capacity standard (and yes I know about bulk film backs).

Wayne

Well I was getting about 100 photos with 1gb. I think having my 4gb card is a lot easier than carrying around a laptop to unload files on to. Lately when I've been shooting, it's on location and for several hours at a time. One day I ended up doing two shoots before I was any where near a place that had electricity or running water. I was deleting "bad" photos to make room for more.

So yes, there are those of us that NEED them.