Miniature Hard Drives
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- Опубликовано: 8 фев 2025
- Exploring some of the tiniest hard drives ever made.
HD-TechDat Microdrive History
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Music:
Ecco The Tides of Time Two Tides (Sin City Mix) OC ReMix
KLF - Chill Out (JC edit)
16:35 That Hitachi 6GB controller board had to be the damn cutest spinny-drive controller board I ever done seen!
Check his older video on these drives, there was even a smaller one in a Nokia phone.
Small correction. Microdrives are not he same form factor as your average CF card. Microdrives are CFII and most CF cards are CFI. Microdrives are 5 mm thick, CFI cards are 3,3 mm thick.
I also noticed they're a tiny bit thicker. I didn't know CFI and CFII were a thing.
@@teamredstudio7012 I think it comes from Type 1 and Type 2 PCMCIA cards. CF1 is the same thickness as PCMCIA type 1, CF2 is the same as PCMCIA type 2 (which were by far the most common size). I had an IBM 1GB MicroDrive and it came with a PCMCIA type 2 adaptor.
The fact that you can now store 1tb of storage space in the size of a penny (microsd) these days amazes me. back in my youth (i'm 50) a 40 mb brick of an HD drive was not only very expensive, but also considered large.
Just eighth years younger, i can remember being queen of the block with my 4 GByte harddisk i earned from three weeks as an pupils intern. When the internship was done the owner of the place let me choose something from the shop for 300 DM and i took home that 4 GByte HDD thinking that thing would last forever. 😅
I remember those! Remember the Apple II and having to go through the 5.25 disks just to load software? I wouldn't have known what to think about MicroSD back then. Even a PS1 memory card seemed like magic
See "Johnny Mnemonic" as a reference how much that progress was misjudged in the 80s! (the movie was made way later in the 90s) The story takes place in 2021.
At our real 2021 strorimg 500Gig in one of your teeth would have been way cheaper and way harder to detect (and way less invasive to implant). Gold teeth are still common and pretty much xray proof.
Wait, I thought the biggest Micro SD card was 512GB, now there are 1TB versions!?
Jesus...
@@FinalBossOfCanada have one in my Steamdeck, expensive but oh so worth it.
It's amazing how fast these tiny discs can stop spinning and spin up to full speed again. I guess that's an advantage of having a way lower mass. Incredibly fascinating!
I remember this time -- people shulking microdrives from Creative's MP3 player and reinstalling smaller capacity flash based drives back in, then either returning/refunding it or selling it as secondhand players.
Lol reminds me of people buying large hard drives and returning the small original Xbox hard drive that did not have the size on the labels instead.
Another great video! I love how small these drives are, and it makes me wonder how much these small drives could hold today
ayo 15 secs ago
I enjoy the way your videos are equal parts archeology and surgery - plus I get to see gadgets I could never afford at the time. You also realise the amnesiac effect smartphones have had on us...
It's funny, I remember as a kid wondering how they fit so much space into iPods when competitors were still bragging about having like 128mb. Blew my mind they managed to shove a spinning platter in something as small as an iPod, especially when the sizes grew to 80GB+. Stuff like this is just wizardy to me lol.
I always wanted one of those Creative Zen micros. I was fascinated by the thought that these tiny devices had entire hard drives in them.
the Nokia n91 included an even smaller 0.86" Toshiba 4GB hard drive. So cool!
i think that used dual voltage mmc esque connector
i have a nokia N70 but it aint work i tried everything
@@spazjackrabbit61it is identical, but I don't think it could be read in MMC slot or vice versa
The Nokia n91 will get a dedicated video one day with that tiny hard drive.
Thanks for taking us to better times mate...
The reason youre not able to read the SMART data from your drives is that that data is part of the ATA command set. Most mass storage USB drivers dont support pass-through of this type of data. If you connected these directly via IDE, it would probably have worked.
Not just probably, it did work!
@JanusCycle Glad to have been of assistance *tips fedora*
I have barely heard of micro drives but I have learned the iPod had a hard drive in it but I enjoy nice and niche electronics
Thanks William, I'm glad you enjoyed this.
@JanusCycle you are welcome thank you for taking apart niche electronics I use to take apart toy conputers as a kid to see the insides a bit and played with them in 1997 I myself just still have a digital camera from mid 2010 myself but I have had a compact flash card in 2012
Hi! Great video, as usual! If you reassemble the zen micro/find a battery for it, be aware that by formatting the drive you effectively wiped out the player's firmware, so you will need to get the firmware update package and run it on an appropriately vintage machine in order to restore the player back to working order.
I did wonder about this when formatting. I have since seen there is a way to restore it without a backup fortunately.
@@JanusCycle if you encounter issues, I have a CF modded Zen and the original drive out of it (which hopefully still works), so I can image mine.
There was one use for these for a few years after high capacity cards came out: applications which are write heavy (multiple full device writes per day). Flash wears out, these don't. But with the terrabyte sized microsd cards today, this use case isn't relevant anymore.
Flash does wear out, yes, but the rate at which it wears out is often greatly exaggerated.
I have a tiny, non-branded 2GB SD card that I bought in the early 2010s for next to nothing. I used it heavily in my Nokia and later in my Windows Phone, storing movie after movie, and yet, somehow, it still works.
So, unless SD cards aren’t made as well as they used to be, I see no reason to be concerned about wear-unless they’re used as a boot drive for Windows. Even then, they will probably last 8-10 years, on par with mechanical drives in terms of life expectancy.
@@Sam-K Have you read my comment carefully enough? I wrote multiple full device writes for a reason. You will not get anywhere close to that no matter how hard you try to use it. What you did was considered normal. Or were you writing 10+GB of data (5 full device writes) every single day for many years to it? Because in this rare application that's what was happening. A flash based CF card fails after a few week if you do that to it.
I have seen multiple SD cards die on me when used in RPis used for home server duty, that only stopped when the DietPi distro came around that did save logfiles to a small RAM disk.
And i had a 2 GByte solid state IDE drive die on me with XP, had tested that OS in a thin client and the drive didn't last long, at least it let me run some matches of Quake 3 on the thin client.
“What do you want to the dialer to dial?” “Nothing.” “Oh, okay boss”
Love the UI Style, reminds me of Windows Mobile & The Bluecurve theme from RedHat
These Zen Micro MP3s need the battery to power on. I have mine with a third-party battery from an old OPPO phone. These shared the same factors.
This tech passed me by but it's fascinating to learn about it. Spotted the KLF at the end.
KLF :)
I so much wanted to do exactly that for long time but have no spare money or ability to order and ship here all this things for research. Thank you a lot for posting it.
Proprietary connector at 12:40 is actually Korean TTA-24 connector. TTA stands for Korean Telecommunications Technology Association (TTA).
It was one of national standard connector to reduce cost and improve compatibility between phone makers. I know it sounds weird but it was back then. People hated it tho.
Very interesting, thank you.
I had a Seagate 3gb miniature drive in 2005. That thing was ahead of its time and i really miss not having it in my collection.
I do believe the Seagate drive was smaller. I think .8"
13:13
And there it is. However the one I had did come out of a Seagate USB 3 gb spinning drive. Still now I'm going start purchasing all these cheap mp3 player from thrift stores for $1.
I remember being young and admiring my ipod mini, not understanding how it worked, an eternity later, taking it apart and marvelling again at the tiny drive but this time with more knowledge of technology. Thanks for reminding me. Always thankful for your channel and the work you put in for us
Top quality video with lots of research and information. Great job!
Yeah!!! ❤️❤️
thank you :)
The small HDD feels like something out of a steampunk world
Your previous video on these miniature drives is what got me hooked on your channel and content, I even saved that video in my playlist and downloaded it. I just had to click as fast as possible on this one too. Also in the previous video you showed us that Nokia phone that had a small drive in it, wasn't that smaller than these ones?
Yes, the Nokia n91 has an even smaller 0.85 inch drive. But that will have to wait for it's own dedicated video.
Amazng video, almost hypnotic. I remember hearing about these drives when i was a teenager, but they were far too expensive and hitech for me to see in real life.
i see janus video
i click and watch it
It's fascinating how we can now have 2tb on a nail size microsd card. I hate phone manufacturers removing card slots so we can't easily expand the memory, forcing us to buy higher storage options
always interesting videos! thanks for you passion
Perfect 20:00 video length ! my OCD is satisfied... that was until I clicked the video and the HTML5 player decided to say 19:59 lol
Great video. This reminded me of my first MP3 player from early 2004: The RIO Karma. It was a squarish thing with a scroll wheel on the top right corner and it contained a 20 gigabyte mechanical hard drive. It also came with a decent dock for connecting to hifi equipment and even had a LAN port on the dock to allow it to be accessed via pretty much anything on a LAN. It was a great bit of kit for the time.
Marvels of engineering! And today we have 2TB microSD cards the size of a fingernail, what a time to be alive!
Miss the pocket PC era. I had one of the iPaq's and a Jornada 720. Even bought a 2nd one after the 1st one wore out due to me using it everywhere. I seriously considered microdrives, due to them being cheaper than flash, but still costing a fortune. I chose in favor of having flash. Just less of it. On trips I'd borrow cards from friends. Around 2004 I got an external USB storage stick that used a microdrive. I took it out and it sits somewhere in a parts bin. It has a proprietary non-IDE header, so I have no way of using it. And it's only 1.4GB.
Great video. Thank you for sharing
That was the peak of technology, not any harassing AI
Now who remembers this 'get perpendicular' video from Hitachi :D
What about changing firmware in those microdrives to expand support of other protocol?
Yeah i kinda want to know if that's possible!!! ❤❤
How powerful is this motor that with a 5v power supply it can not only spin at 3,600 rpm, but also read and write data to this disk while doing so?
If you put a propeller, a tiny 5v battery and a remote control on it, it would probably put most of today's most expensive toy drones to shame!
The mass it needs to spin is tiny and there is almost no air resistance. And by the way: these microdrives also work on 3.3 Volts.. Still they are a marvel of engineering but then again modern 36 TB drives are also incredible pieces of precision.
There's a microdrive for the PSP that clipped onto the back. it had a cord that went into the memory stick slot and converted it to CF so they could use it.
I love this.
The miniaturization of those drives is amaizig. I cut my teeth, so to speak, on RLL and MFM drives. They weighed about a pound per megabyte.
Your Creative Zen should work with any Nokia BL5C style battery. They're still readily available and a dime a dozen ;)
Thank you. I have of course some of those!
Nice little Detail with the Video Runtime of 20:00mins. :)
I bet you they had made the dialer thinking they would make a palm phone only to realize that nobody wanted to support a phone they didn't control from top to bottom like was the norm back in the day
As with most devices with batteries the power side is designed around a parallel circuit. A missing battery is like a missing bulb, electricity cannot continue without a solid link. Eg battery
I was just abut to say that's just like a CF card. Tiny drives have alwaays been amazing to me. iPods with harddrives were just amazing. I still use them, they also work as external HDD that don't draw much power over USB, which lets you use external HDD on your iPhone for example.
Amazing video as always, but you never explained why standalone MicroDrives cost so much more than the ones embedded in MP3 players despite being the same thing?
I don't know, so I will only be speculating. Maybe Creative bought a bulk order and agreed to handle warranty problems themselves. Hitachi would have made a small profit in a single deal.
Or Hitachi were marking up their retail drives to $499 because they knew their only competition was only with flash based cards were over $1000 each.
Funny enough, the original drives from my iPod minis do read fine in my USB card reader, and the iPod mini reads any compact flash card just fine aswell.
No matter if it´s in "fixed disk" mode or not, as a lot of modern compact flash cards do no longer support "fixed mode".
There were also embedded microdrives made by seagate, the ST1 drive.
They had a ribbon cable permanently attached.
Unfortunately, the Olympus m:robe is using those and it makes it impossible to replace or upgrade the microdrives, unless you find another ST1 drive...
Luckily i got a bunch of them NOS and upgraded from 5GB to 6GB drives.
Yea flash drives are more efficient and all, but I just love mechanical storages 😊
I had a noname mp3 player with a small color display and a mini HDD drive.
The drive was probably a bit smaller and had a different connector.
The player could also display images but not video.
You ever considered a second channel where you upload the video footage of you taking things apart without the voice over? Would make for some great asmr content!
there were a phone card adapter for these pdas ( zaurus). at least it worked in Japan. don't know about the rest of the world
There is yet another microdrive format HDD standard, that connects to devices via a 20 pin flex cable. I forgot the name of the interface standard, Celessis, Gennesus or something like that. I'll dig it again if I remember where I left off. It comes from a Sony music player, IIRC, it's not compatible with anything else and the controller is embedded on the player. There is no PC card or interface for that. IDK if the drive still works.
A Tiny Miracle...
Fascinating
I have bought one of these "embedded" drives brand new, still stealed. A Seagate ST1 drive. The only difference to my original IBM 1GB Microdrive was that the ST1 drive came unformatted. Both work in every CFII device I have.
Hey! I got one of those!!
I traded a guy a 4GB Flash card for it cause I thought the tiny hard drive was neat
Heheh 20:00 long
I remember dismantling my creative muvo to use its 4GB microdrive in my HP2215.
I had a netbook with that same Samsung microdrive in it. Or something like that. I remember it didn't have too much storage, and it had one of the 2nd gen intel atom chips with powervr graphics
It might have been a 1.8 inch hard drive which are a bit bigger. I could be wrong though, and I hope I am. I would love to see a netbook with a 1 inch microdrive!
I took a 1.8 inch hard drive apart in the iPod video just over a year ago because of course I did :)
@JanusCycle I think you're right, actually I remember it being the same drive that was in an iPod because I was able to swap it out for an iPod drive. Thanks for the clarification!
Can you share some highres photos of the tiny drives?
Yes, I've now made a note to get that done this week.
incrível!!! 🤩
It is perfectly normal to not be able to read SMART trough usb cardreader. Software use different method to communicate with drive directly which is not standard and only known how to implement for few usb cardreader chips. If you try do it on linux with smart console tool it would explicitly mention this fact.
Testing these on my next Linux install on a machine with a CF/PCMCIA port will be interesting. I'm very interested in exploring the difference between USB card readers, CF/PCMCIA and the USB IDE adaptor.
Your videos are the fuckin best bro thank you
Awesome :)
The iPod classics also had these drives, up to 160gb, didn't they?
they used bigger, 1.8" hard drives and janus did made a video about the original ipod
I wonder if Clive Sincalir got a kickback for the Microdrive name 😃
I have 2 of those Hitachi 5GB micro drives with the unusually small interface. I wonder how I can use them for something else.
I do think it's an IDE interface. But we will need an adaptor to convert that to a more common IDE.
that is cool
I have a lifedrive on my shelf with a 128gb cf upgrade.
I want to know how they sold the mp3 players with the 4gb drives in them so cheaply? They had to be losing money on them right? They didn't have an online marketplace like Apple music to make it back did they? I don't get it.
You can get a zif cable to IDE adapter set. If you try adapting it to CF card IDE you should avoid making the mistake I did, these drives run on 3.3v and not 5v like most CF cards do! Rip my 40gb 1.8" zif drive I'm sorry.
I would love to get ths drive working. Except this is not the same connector as zif that 1.8 inch drives use, it's smaller will a tighter pin pitch.
@@JanusCycle Yeah so you just have to find the (rarer) smaller to zif cable.
Does anyone know a drive/card combination that would work with a Roland MC-80 Midi sequencer? I tried so many kinds, but nothing gets recognized. It's supposed to be standard IDE, but they only had something like 6 drives in total that were supported. They're impossible to locate, and flash cards don't get recognized, no matter what interface card I use. Has anyone been successful at finding a modern drive solution for old Roland's?
What capacity card does the Roland normally work with? Do you know the brands that are supposed to work?
Maybe trying an embedded Compact Flash card.
why didn't they make an adapter back then so the drives worked in cameras? shouldve been possible
Well, the Rio Carbon had a CompactFlash form-factor 5 GB of storage on a 1" microdrive HDD from Toshiba baked into the Carbon case. You can hear it whirring as it plays songs too. Since the physical interface is CompactFlash - it should have been possible to stick one of these into a camera and have the camera access the CompactFlash storage as normal - without it knowing that it was reading/writing photos to a HDD.
The video was deceptive. The HDDs are thicker than regular compactflash cards
Type II cards are indeed thicker in the Compact Flash specification.
Yes it's not you, there's audio crackling from 0:18 to 0:22
15:43 What happens if you seal that hole?
I don't really know. My guess is to equalize air pressure.
I had a Rio Carbon mp3 player with a 2.5gb micro drive. I tried to swap in an 8gb compactflash card but it didn't work. Perhaps it needed drivers?
I'm always wary when crossing the 4GB level with differences to things like filesystems. Also maybe some firmware was on the drive.
Yeahh !!! 🎉🎉🎉 the man ... The myth... the legend ❤❤❤
Nokia N91 Hard drive 4gb
so cutes
You shouldn't have deleted that first, inappropriate comment, since it was way too funny in the context of micro drives.
Whoa the Samsung 40gb microdrive looks like it uses ZIF. I now want to try to put one into a Zune.
It's not quite zif, the connector is smaller on this drive.
SOOOO AADDORREABLE!!!!!!!