What is a Micro Drive?

I've been seeing some reference to micro drives and was wondering what these are and how they are used?

Todd,

They are minature hard drives used in digital cameras the same as Compact Flash cards. They replace film.

A Microdrive is a very small hard drive in the form factor of a type II compact flash card. They were originally released by IBM and the most common ones are now 1 GB. Recently another company (I forget the name) bought the rights from IBM and IBM is no longer building them.

Unlike solid state compact flash cards, micro drives have moving parts. This makes them use more power than the solid state cards so only certain devices that were built to use them can use them.

When released, they were/are significantly less money for the size of the storage than the solid state cards. The trade off is that, because they have moving parts, they are more likely to fail at the worst time.

Hitatchi bought them. They come up to 4gb - the 1gb drives are pretty cheap right now - hopefully balancing the risk of drive failure. They can't take the abuse the flash cards can, since they've got moving parts.

The 2GB and 4GB Hitachi Microdrives are not yet available but will be within the next couple of months. Their performance will far exceed the current 1GB drives and be on par with flash but at a much lower price point than the current crop of 2GB and 4GB flash cards.