With those low speeds, kinda surprised to hear that they found their way into laptops as primary storage. But I guess for something that was that era's version of a "Chromebook" this would have been completely acceptable, eh? No need for high read/write speeds for word processing and spreadsheets. I imagine that made boot times EVEN worse than usual for the era though lol.
@wrth eMMC is fine for cheaper devices. Yes, sluggish, but dirt cheap and widely available. And it's not -that- bad. The base model of the steam deck uses eMMC and its doing its job adequately.
It may be less possible today than back then. As solid-state has replaced electro-mechanical, our ability to fabricate such tiny mechanical components has diminished.
@@BrandtRedd I wouldn’t say impossible, more improbable, We still have all the knowledge to make these, the problem is the machinery that made them probably dosnt exist anymore, right along with what you said
@@BrandtRedd there's not any specialized fabrication in that assembly. We're far better at miniaturization today than 30-40 years ago. This would be far easier to create today. Maybe you could argue that we don't have tooling to create players that are 1" in diameter, but that's a non issue.
@@littlejackalo5326 it’s not about theoretical capacity but practical. Theoretically we could build a new factory for CRTs too. But without the capital to get it set back up, no one is doing it, and so the practical skills are also getting rusty. Go long enough without doing it, and just having the schematics isn’t actually sufficient anymore - as can be seen by people failing to build Victorian steam locomotives from the blueprints. The “techne” has been retained but the “metis” has been lost, to use the jargon from one particular philosophy of epistemology. Many militaries around the world have faced this issue too, they try to do maintenance/rebuild on some older gear and after even 10 years of no one doing it, there’s no one with the practical knowledge left in the organisation to actually do it properly. Even with all the documentation intact. We’re not quite at that stage yet for Microdrives, because larger hard drives are still being manufactured. And Brandt chose his words carefully, as he said “diminished”. But there would still need to be a decent chunk of change spent on R&D to get good at the specific application again, in addition to the capital costs of setting up the production line again. And until/if that ever happens, no one is producing tiny hard drives, so the institutional retained knowledge will continue to diminish.
The other fun fact about Compact Flash is that it's ATA compatible, meaning that with a cheap passive adapter, you could plug it directly into an IDE socket on your laptop or PC. I recently took the 6GB drive out of my iPod mini and replaced it with a CF to SD adapter and a 256GB microSD card. The second gen mini will accept cards up to this size believe it or not!
I used a compact flash drive as a SSD in the past to use as a boot drive for a linux firewall. on a super-old HP SFF 486 desktop, it was lightning fast compared to the crappy HDDs of the time.
Several of the fuel dispenser that you see around you have full on motherboards including all of the normal IO running off Compact Flash. At the lease the Gilbarco Encores withing the last 10 years have.
Surprised he didn't mention that the CF/Microdrive interface is also pin compatible with the IDE standard, which is why CF cards are a go to for retro hardware nerds like myself. Fast, effective, and reliable for anything Windows 3.11 on back provided you go with the "industrial" or "heavy duty" versions but you lose the auditory aesthetic of true spinning rust.
I was about to mention that. I have CF adapters for a computer with IDE ports and it works pretty well. There's no logic on the adapter, it's a plain PCB with connectors, a jumper, and an LED.
I used a CF to IDE adapter back in the day to recycle an old laptop into a digital picture frame. The CF held just enough storage for the OS and pictures and allowed the picture frame to run without hard drive noises Edit" the video is still on RUclips :-D ruclips.net/video/LQFT2ZaFOjI/видео.html
As a kid (un)fortunate enough to have a Sinclair QL as the home computer / dad's computer I grew up with Microdrive Cartridges before 3.5'' 'floppies' even existed and 360kb genuinely floppy 5.25'' disks were the norm.. Sinclair Microdrive Cartridges could hold about 110kb on a continuous loops of tape (so random access unlike an audio cassette).. -- IBM's microdrives may be 1000x better in every way but aren't REMOVABLE media, and Sinclair Microdrive user will tell you there is something special about the feel and sound of inserting a Sinclair Microdrive Cartridge into a Sinclair Microdrive.... The cartridges were about the same size as an IBM microdrive too, if not a bit smaller. -- Ironically, I had a mini PC business (mainly on ebay) for a while 20 years ago and used a microdrive as the main hard drive on many. They were actually more reliable, faster and cheaper than CF Flash for many years. Many writes quickly kill CF cards, even with no swap file. A microdrive could run a swap file and take as many OS installs as you like.. blah blah.. Microdrives!
I remember the first time I realised my iPod had a spinning hard drive in it. When you started playing music, you could feel the gyroscopic effect of the platter spinning up. I'm amazed how well they dealt with being portable devices subject to acceleration and rotational forces, etc.
I'm still amazed how well 2.5" work on a laptops. They work fine on car or train, but when my friend were angry that his laptop lags, he just broke one by hitting it.
Flash memory is really useful. Hardrives take the same power whther its reading slow or fast, so you may as well shove everything as fast as you can into memory. Ipod gained a shit ton of battery life because of that, same with anything that reads spinning media. Like Discmans and MD walkmans.
I used them in my old mini PC shop for converting my smallest thin clients into stand-alones,20 years ago. They were cheaper per MB and more reliable than CF cards even though mechanical as a cheap CF card would often fail during it's first windows install,, and even better quality ones couldn't take more than a few installs (or say going from windows to linux and back to windows).. I learned this the expensive way. I bought 300 second hand microdrives once. about 1 in 20 were duff but I was expecting much worse, and never had any of the thin client conversions back. I was always amazed at how robust they were once installed.
What might also be interesting to note is that IBM contracted a watchmaker to make these (at least in the beginning) because the hard drive producing companies at the time had no experience making such tiny devices.
@@batt3ryac1d to be fair technology has changed alot ever since I personally miss the old wacky days of keypad phones, they got all sorts of shapes and sizes then. But i understand how that wouldn’t work for smartphones which need to follow standardized shapes to fit the apps they work with.
@@erik3371 haha I get that, to be fair i'm 28 myself but I grew up with a lot of old tech so i might be on the young side but i'm a chocked as you are when some people don't know what a cassette is.
I remember a guy from IBM who came to our class for a lecture. He said that the hardware people were developing a hard disc the size of a quarter to put a large amount of data to it. It was up to us the software people to work hard and to figure out how to access these large amount of data from these advancing technologies. Lots of math in our software classes (maybe 80% was math).
Now we have 1TB microSD cards the size of your pinky fingernail! I'm a nostalgia nerd as much as anyone so all these old tech videos are right up my alley but it really gives you an appreciation for the tech we have now.
I still think the ORIGINAL MICRODRIVE cartridge was the best audio and picture form factor, even if it died before digital audio and pictures for the mass market was a thing.. They were dead by the mid 1980s. The SINCLAIR Microdrive Cartridge could only hold about 100kb at the time but if it had progressed along with tape recorder tech. it could have beaten the 3.5'' floppy. It was about 1/6th the size of a 3.5'' floppy.. Came out in 1982/1983...The failed Sinclair QL had a double Microdrive (TM)!
Yeah. However for the smallest sizes there surely needs to be something done for random access performance. Sequential speeds are usually fine for what they are - but bad random access really limits the usefulness. Wish they'd stuck to large SD card size and implemented a proper SSD controller - that would really do wonders. Both performance and longivity. I have a surveilance system which records videos when I'm not a home. There's always a bunch of animals and USB and MicroSD are worn out in a year. And if not worn to the point of error then work enough to be slow as mollasses. Last time I changed local storage (there's also cloud storage but it can run full and in the event it or internet is down) for a proper SSD - just a cheap green WD - about the cheapest I could find and not at all expensive. That one just performs and nowhere near worn down even been in operation for 2-3 years.
Let's take a moment to appreciate IBM for giving proper full sized gigabytes & not cheaping out. It's this little things like this which make you feel warm inside 😊
The first digital camera I used was floppy based. To get the full 640 resolution you got 11 photos per disc. Had to carry a bunch to take the school formal photos.
I remember, in the mid-'90s there was a small hard disk that was maybe the size of a PC card. It was meant for use in a Canon DSLR. Being a professional photo assistant at the time, I went to a workshop where we learned how to use all the new digital gear. It was 640 megs, I think. I think the cheapest pro digital camera outfit we saw that day was $10k US. Some of our employers could afford them, but we could never hope to. I very much miss the scanning backs for view cameras. They simply aren't available anymore.
@@kaitlyn__L it might have been, although PC cards were already used for other things. There were modems, ethernet, and a few others. This one actual took two PC card slots that cut away so that you could put it in. People usually didn't use laptops for digital imaging baxk then. The screens didn't give enough color accuracy, and they just weren't powerful enough.
I'm so glad you are doing content on these older techs that changed the way things were done. Its important to know the history of it so we can learn from and appreciate the engineering that made everything we have today possible
I remember when these came out and how impressed I was by them. Granted storage space these days is insane, but these are still pretty impressive bits of tech.
@@s.i.m.c.a Nah. Nothing really moving inside those, not in the mechanical sense. Nothing really neat about them aside from their storage space alone. It is the miniaturization of the mechanical stuff that makes these things still pretty impressive. Also the fact that they were designed to be moved around in ways that regular mechanical hard drives are not. Which is something that does not really need to be accounted for with modern flash memory. Not in the way a spinning platter and moving head needs to. Much more akin to the stresses of a laptop hard drive. Also, keep in mind what other read, write and transfer speeds were prevalent in the 90s and 00s. So, not nearly as big of a hit in performance as similar numbers would be today. Still, it is a pretty valid comparison when thinking about how both work in the real world.
It's crazy to think how much work went into manufacturing so many unbelievably small parts to shrink a drive to that size just to get a couple GB or even a few hundred MB into a 1" space. Then you fast forward a decade or two and we have drives with 1000GB that are basically a millimetre thick plastic chip the size of a fingernail
It's honestly kinda weird to me that these didn't improve in capacity and/or manufacturing efficiency over the years and just kinda died out. Then again, current metal platter tech has kinda stagnated a bit in terms of growth.
This has to be one of the cutest "disassemblings" I've seen.loved the contrast between the whispering tone when handling and describing each layer, then the whoops of enthusiasm when matching each part to its enormous brother!
I remember getting a USB version of the Microdrive as a college student! I saw one in the local Computer Hardware shop, thought it was pretty novel (I was 16 at the time...) and bought one. I used the college network for downloading things while in class (Because my home internet was painfully slow) and needed a compact way of getting that back home... These Microdrives were bigger than the USB Flash Drives (128MB was common at the time) and they worked! But, I ended up completely ruined it by not taking care of it. Fun times!
I have a hard drive USB that was a little less wide than a credit card, but yet still thin enough to fit in your palm. Me and brother wondered if other people ever had such a thing and to even see who made the damn thing! To this very day, the tiny hard drive is an absolute mystery to us
@@alexstromberg7696 No, I think I know what form factor he's talking about. There were 1.8 inch sized drives in the early-mid 2000s that were used in regular iPods and are also really slim (as they had larger capacity than these micro-HDDs or CF cards at the time). That's how Apple got 30gb into devices like iPod Video which was only 1cm deep, all the way back in 2005.
@@NFMorley I have a 2008 HTC Shift X9500 with a 1.8" 120GB HDD and the original 40GB HDD. The 120GB is clearly thicker than the 40GB one so I guess it has two platters. They are cool but slow for Windows Vista/7
This was so cool. It aligns perfectly with the rise of digital photography. I remember paying $110 for a 1GB CF card. Honestly even today, my 32GB CF card is impressively fast for how old the standard for it is.
One of the reasons flash memory media dropped so quickly in price in the early 2000s was not just 'the technology maturing', but because like DRAM chips, NAND chips were subject to price fixing shenanigans, but when the DRAM scandal came to light, the NAND market gave up its pricing hijinks as well, considering most companies making one also made the other. RAM and flash media dropped in price at a staggering rate in that time, and it didn't really bottom out until the early 2010s.
Thank you for some of these recent videos that cover tech history. I think these are invaluable at preserving context that the younger generation won’t have experienced.
Wow. That was really interesting. I knew ipods had an HD but assumed they were just ... I guess I didn't give it much thought. Miniaturizing all the components must have been a pretty tricky engineering problem, esp when they had to assume drops and bumpy use over the expected lifespan. Cool!
I loved my 3.5 disk camera. My family had a couple. Not too bad at the time and was very easy to send pictures to family without plugging in the camera or needing some card adapter.
Same here. If I was out taking pictures, I didn't need a laptop to get clear out storage before taking more pictures. At that time you could buy floppies for so cheap you could just pick up another box to have in reserve. I frequently had the leg up on my brother who had a CF camera at the same time.
This is so crazy. Today you have up to 8TB m.2 SSD. Back in the days I had one of the first MP3 Players with 128 MB space. Some guys from my school asked me, where to put the CDs in :D In the last ~20 years so much happened. Cant wait to see what else will happen in the next 20 years.
I had an early Creative Nomad mp3 player. The model with no storage (add your own card) was $100. But the one with 64 MB flash was $300! 😳Wow, how times have changed.
My first digital camera had a microdrive. Actually, the first one I got was faulty - if you held it near your ear you could just hear THAT clicking noise, the classic "hard disk trying to initialise" click of doom. Swapped out under warranty of course, and the next one lived until bigger storage became a thing. Probably still works, not fired it up in a couple of decades tho.
More of this, please. I grew up in the 90s and didn't know so much about this. And thoroughly enjoyed seeing just how far we've come in half a lifetime. Do GPUs next? 😄
I had one of those old Sony digital cameras that used floppies for picture storage. It may not be great compared to today, but back then it was terrific.
My friend has a camera that recorded on LS120. That was pretty dope! It's crazy how quickly, and far NAND has progressed after becoming a viable alternative to micro HDD.
0:16 Linus: "but what choice did we have" Film... serious photographers used film back then. the quality of that early digital camera would have been worse than bad
12:51 I loved the Creative Nomad Jukebox! That thing was fantastic when I was on the ship in the Navy, I didn't need my huge CD binders to hold all the discs. I think it had a 6GB drive in it, which given the low bit-rates we could rip MP3s at the time, it could hold a TON of music.
Pre-ordered the 1GB model when it was announced, for my Canon Powershot camera. All I could tell about it was that it was slightly faster than the flash cards I was comparing it to, and the capacity was vast at the time. And I loved that little whir sound after taking a picture, though you had to have the camera close to your ear to hear it.
When you say "faster" in this context does that mean that you had to wait after each picture some time before you could take the next one? Do you roughly know how long that was?
@@Jehty_ I believe there was a very brief delay while the camera wrote to the card, but not really that noticeable. I was mainly referring to bulk operations, like when using the microdrive or CF card with a laptop via the PCMCIA slot, moving a lot of images, etc. For just taking single images, it seemed like it was writing the entire image to cache; you weren't stuck waiting while the disk was still spinning. (My recall is pretty fuzzy; it's been a long time.)
Now we have to choose between ~3,500 MBps or ~7,000 MBps. I’m building a new mini ITX setup for my living room, and trying to convince my wife to go with gen 4 PCIe is difficult…
It's mildly irratating for me if someone complains about a 5gb update and say it is super slow. Back when adsl arrived in my country we could only use 5GB per month.
I used to have one of those little square Creative MP3 players, and hearing (and feeling!) that little microdrive seeking was always a surreal experience - just knowing that there was a tiny, fully functional hard drive squeezed in there somewhere.
I remember my mother upgrading from a Polaroid camera to a floppy disk camera for work back in 1999,I found it in the attic last year and I think the picture resolution was 640x480
@@Nick-ds6oc when there where a think anytthing have floppy dive, last one I saw it using hd disk, the 720 where still a thing back then, (don't no, but would get, if could use 720 fat) formatted floppy, almost any machine with floppy 3.5 drive could read the floppy images, of the disk, even more convenient, flapping SD-cards today
CF cards are technically IDE ATA (technically PATA), which is an extension of the upper bits of 16bit ISA and it remotely follows the MFM harddrive protocols from the AT PS2 era. PCMCIA just used the same standard. You can passively convert CF cards to IDE without requiring any controller and it works fine on older machines.
3:06 I have exactly the same 340 MB microdrive that I bought around the year 2000 to 2002. It is still working, and I keep it in my drawer. During that time, the largest flash storage media were 128 MB, such as 128 MB SmartMedia cards and 128MB Sony Memory Sticks. Colleagues around me were surprised when they saw the 340 MB microdrive. Everyone would say, 'Wow! You have such a large drive!‘
The 1.8" drives are amazing if you think about it. The 40GB iPod Classic came out 20 years ago. And yet now you can still get like 32-64GB Phones. The 160 GB iPod came out 15 years ago. The current iPhone and Galaxy still have a 128 GB Model for 800 bucks. If you told someone 15 years ago that their iPhone in 15 years might have less storage than their iPod now, I don't think they would've believed it. Sure the storage got smaller and faster and you can get 512gb options for a lot more money but the fact that the base models are still in that region is kinda weird.
No the only iPod to use 1" microdrive was the iPod Mini. All other iPods use 1.8 Drives. 1st - 4th gen uses ZIF connectors and later models use micro sata
As sure as I am that videos about new and expensive tech are more fun to make and likely make more money I really enjoy this type of retrospective look at hardware that take you through the advancements that certain technology has made over the years, makes you appreciate what we have now just that little bit more.
My school had a few floating around the photography department. The teacher in charge actually convinced the principal at the time to buy a bunch of flash cards (because students+moving drives don't mix), but the cameras they bought came with them anyway. By the time I got there, they were sort of irrelevant, but why throw out something if it can be used? Trusted students were allowed to borrow equipment over term breaks or the weekend etc. and usually they got given the microdrives rather than the flash drives.
I bought a Sony Mavica around December, and it's been really interesting to work with, strategizing how to fit images on Floppies has a fun novelty in the modern age
It was so cool back in the day to feel my iPod's hard drive spin up inside it. Solid state memory is hands down better, but man, there was a charm to that.
One thing you forgot to mention, is that people normally use harddrives over flash because of their reliability. And what people quickly realised is that these tiny drives weren't necessarily as reliable as their larger counterparts so therefore offered very little advantages over flash technology. I had microdrives clearly wear out and get corrupted the more they were used, which is basically the same problem as flash has.
When Linus held up the two hard drives, all that came to mind was this quote: "Mini Me, you complete me.". Then cued up the song "Just the two of us"...
Just a fun fact, air bus a320 and 321s still use pcmcia cards to store flight data and every 10 days gets swapped out for a fresh one while the old info is dumped for data collection then wiped clean to be used again
I'm heading into the garage to grab my defunct LifeDrive, extract the mini-drive, strip it, and display it in a little picture frame, alongside my old CPUs and 512-Byte 2114 memory modules from my OSI Superboard II.
I still have my first usb flash drive, a 1GB Verbatim. It was very expensive, but I wanted to be able to store a CD image in it! Back in the day it was mindblowing... A few years later they were giving them away for free, I have a Coca Cola branded one.
Wow 1Gig in 2005? That must have been fucking expensive. I still have an 256MB Apacer Steno from that time and it already cost over 100 bucks back then...
@@Setsuna_Kyoura My first drive was a 2GB A-Data and it died in a few years. Then I got a 4GB OCZ which used a dual channel flash controller to achieve higher speeds. It actually maxed out USB 2. It was very expensive for the time. About $200, which could have bought a 16GB drive. But this drive, I could full read/write in 5 minutes vs. the several hours it would take to actually transfer 16GB on the cheaper drive. And after a million drops and even a few washing machine cycles, it still works today. And - in terms of speed, at least - it's actually still very competitive with modern commodity drives.
Storage capacity-vs-cost has continued to plummet. I just bought a 512GB M.2 SSD for sixty bucks new..... My first flash drive cost $250 and had a capacity of 256MB. It was the top-of-the-line drive of the time though, brushed aluminum case and supported a full USB1 write speed. ;)
@@Setsuna_Kyoura it was stupid expensive, I can't recall exactly what the exchange rate was, but I must have paid close to $200 USD. It was so stupid expensive that for most stuff I used smaller 64/128mb sticks to avoid wear on the 1GB one... I didn't get to use it that much before they were giving away 1GB sticks for free...
I love videos like this. Interesting tech that, in hindsight, were just stop gaps to where we ended up today. It's crazy to think how far we've come in such a short period of time. As an example, 5 cents per MB to 10 cents per GB and beyond for flash... Absolutely wild.
My dad was an "IBM Partner" when these were launched and they were handing out little Microdrive sized chocolate mints wrapped to look like little Microdrives.
I’ve been unironically been carrying around a Sony Mavica fd-91 since 2019 to take photos with a vintage look. There’s something so charming about loading colorful floppies into it in front of a bunch of strangers. Keeping up with the Joneses is why we live in a throwaway world when everything constantly changes
My first graphic design and digital communication class was done on cameras. The photography teachers themselves vocally spoke out against digital cameras.
i remember my dad and i were into photography but i was actually more into computers.. him and i realized this exact thing and i took one apart myself as well years back. crazy stuff
I actually have a broken one somewhere in my room, my dad was an amateur photographer in the 90s to early 2000s. Makes a little rattle noise when it’s moved lol. I think it’s beyond saving but I wish I could.
I actually was only vaguely aware of the micro drive. I was fully expecting some talk of the 1.5 mini drive that I had encountered in some laptops so this was pretty cool. Especially the take apart
I had one of these a professional photographer friend gave it to me. He tried to use these, and they were a fail. They couldn't tolerate even the lightest bumps or jostles, like cameras often get. They also were power hungry. They were bigger than other memory at the time, but only a bit and that advantage was short lived.
the thing is you didnt really know, since all the loading times just were like this. but play some old games on an old pc and it will just drive you nuts, i guarantee it :D
Somewhere around me here, is a SparQ Drive, which was usually seen with 300/400MB HDD cassettes. The one I have has a removable 1GB HDD Cassette with the cutest little platter! It was configured for W95/98 which was, back then, using internal HDD's with 300/400MB capacity. The guy who gave me it(wasn't it always thus...!) said that the SparQ Drive could hold all he had on his PC of the time. It was read to through the printer port and sat between PC and Printer...but I don't have the funky power cable or the Comm connectors and cables...(over-enthusiastic clear up) Nice one Linus and the team! Cheers!
So, amongst a lot of professional photographers of the day (I worked as assistant at the tail end of high school in 2003-2004) did not trust these things. They had a bad habit of dying and taking all of your valuable photos with them. Flash based drives were so much more reliable. The large factor besides what you mentioned (Moore's law, minimum cost for a hard drive) was that these were always viewed a little suspect, and once flash was even vaguely competitive, most photography magazines and pros recommended abandoning them.
Fact! They were not very shock resistant. All the walking, sudden aiming, bumps, etc and of course shooting didn't lend well to them surviving for too long.
It is worth noting that there were two different thicknesses of CF cards, 3.3 mm "Type 1" and 5 mm "Type II". The Microdrive was a Type II (thicker) card, and not all cameras would accept it in their card slot. I remember that the first digital camera I bought, the Canon G2, was one that did support both thicknesses of CF card. The G2 could be set to output raw-format images instead of JPEGs, and with raw image files being about 50% larger than the highest-quality JPEGs, the extra storage space was important.
I remember a friend having one of these for a camera and it had ONE GIGABYTE of storage. At the time, that felt like infinity for a digital camera.
I have a compact flash for my EOS Rebel XT... 2 GB
@@lth3may029 ok....
I am going insane
@@guadalupe8589 sorry I was just sharing I wasn't trying to be rude
My CD Mavica still works. It's a modern one with silver casing and blue trim.
It actually saves in .TIF files :)
1:37 PCMCIA was jokingly referred to as standing for People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms back in the 90s. 😂
Ha! That’s what I came to post. Just a month late, I guess. 🤣
I worked for a Japanese company at the time. I had to repair a laptop, and it took me a while to figure out this tiny thing was the storage.
With those low speeds, kinda surprised to hear that they found their way into laptops as primary storage.
But I guess for something that was that era's version of a "Chromebook" this would have been completely acceptable, eh? No need for high read/write speeds for word processing and spreadsheets. I imagine that made boot times EVEN worse than usual for the era though lol.
@@Nevir202 these days dirty cheap laptops brand new all have slow soldered EMMC storage. I'm guessing the hard drive was the old equivalent.
@@Nevir202 Boot times were 3-5 minutes and I don't think people noticed.
@@wrth
eMMC is bad, but not quite THAT bad. If the OS is optimized for it you at least still measure boot times in seconds and not minutes.
@wrth eMMC is fine for cheaper devices. Yes, sluggish, but dirt cheap and widely available.
And it's not -that- bad. The base model of the steam deck uses eMMC and its doing its job adequately.
To be honest, I never wouldve guessed that sort of HDD was possible today, let alone over two decades ago! Absolutely impressive
It may be less possible today than back then. As solid-state has replaced electro-mechanical, our ability to fabricate such tiny mechanical components has diminished.
@@BrandtRedd I wouldn’t say impossible, more improbable, We still have all the knowledge to make these, the problem is the machinery that made them probably dosnt exist anymore, right along with what you said
@@BrandtRedd there's not any specialized fabrication in that assembly. We're far better at miniaturization today than 30-40 years ago. This would be far easier to create today. Maybe you could argue that we don't have tooling to create players that are 1" in diameter, but that's a non issue.
@@littlejackalo5326 it’s not about theoretical capacity but practical. Theoretically we could build a new factory for CRTs too. But without the capital to get it set back up, no one is doing it, and so the practical skills are also getting rusty.
Go long enough without doing it, and just having the schematics isn’t actually sufficient anymore - as can be seen by people failing to build Victorian steam locomotives from the blueprints. The “techne” has been retained but the “metis” has been lost, to use the jargon from one particular philosophy of epistemology.
Many militaries around the world have faced this issue too, they try to do maintenance/rebuild on some older gear and after even 10 years of no one doing it, there’s no one with the practical knowledge left in the organisation to actually do it properly. Even with all the documentation intact.
We’re not quite at that stage yet for Microdrives, because larger hard drives are still being manufactured. And Brandt chose his words carefully, as he said “diminished”. But there would still need to be a decent chunk of change spent on R&D to get good at the specific application again, in addition to the capital costs of setting up the production line again. And until/if that ever happens, no one is producing tiny hard drives, so the institutional retained knowledge will continue to diminish.
The other fun fact about Compact Flash is that it's ATA compatible, meaning that with a cheap passive adapter, you could plug it directly into an IDE socket on your laptop or PC. I recently took the 6GB drive out of my iPod mini and replaced it with a CF to SD adapter and a 256GB microSD card. The second gen mini will accept cards up to this size believe it or not!
I used a compact flash drive as a SSD in the past to use as a boot drive for a linux firewall. on a super-old HP SFF 486 desktop, it was lightning fast compared to the crappy HDDs of the time.
Several of the fuel dispenser that you see around you have full on motherboards including all of the normal IO running off Compact Flash. At the lease the Gilbarco Encores withing the last 10 years have.
Bring back Linus Cat Tips
Yeah!
Meow meow there is a Logitech mouse over there
I unironically support this
Yes!
Linus Cat Nips... Wait nvm.. I can just see a hairy linus nipple on my screen🤢 😂😂
Surprised he didn't mention that the CF/Microdrive interface is also pin compatible with the IDE standard, which is why CF cards are a go to for retro hardware nerds like myself. Fast, effective, and reliable for anything Windows 3.11 on back provided you go with the "industrial" or "heavy duty" versions but you lose the auditory aesthetic of true spinning rust.
I was about to mention that. I have CF adapters for a computer with IDE ports and it works pretty well. There's no logic on the adapter, it's a plain PCB with connectors, a jumper, and an LED.
I looked at the port and I went this looks like ide but smaller
I used a CF to IDE adapter back in the day to recycle an old laptop into a digital picture frame. The CF held just enough storage for the OS and pictures and allowed the picture frame to run without hard drive noises
Edit" the video is still on RUclips :-D ruclips.net/video/LQFT2ZaFOjI/видео.html
As a kid (un)fortunate enough to have a Sinclair QL as the home computer / dad's computer I grew up with Microdrive Cartridges before 3.5'' 'floppies' even existed and 360kb genuinely floppy 5.25'' disks were the norm.. Sinclair Microdrive Cartridges could hold about 110kb on a continuous loops of tape (so random access unlike an audio cassette)..
--
IBM's microdrives may be 1000x better in every way but aren't REMOVABLE media, and Sinclair Microdrive user will tell you there is something special about the feel and sound of inserting a Sinclair Microdrive Cartridge into a Sinclair Microdrive.... The cartridges were about the same size as an IBM microdrive too, if not a bit smaller.
--
Ironically, I had a mini PC business (mainly on ebay) for a while 20 years ago and used a microdrive as the main hard drive on many. They were actually more reliable, faster and cheaper than CF Flash for many years. Many writes quickly kill CF cards, even with no swap file. A microdrive could run a swap file and take as many OS installs as you like.. blah blah.. Microdrives!
It's not a truly retro experience if you don't have the hum and clicks of a giant 5.25" HDD spinning up.
I remember the first time I realised my iPod had a spinning hard drive in it. When you started playing music, you could feel the gyroscopic effect of the platter spinning up. I'm amazed how well they dealt with being portable devices subject to acceleration and rotational forces, etc.
Considering i used to skateboard and snowboard with my ipod in my pocket, I'd have to agree
Discman already had the same problem and the solutions are basically the same too.
I'm still amazed how well 2.5" work on a laptops. They work fine on car or train, but when my friend were angry that his laptop lags, he just broke one by hitting it.
Flash memory is really useful. Hardrives take the same power whther its reading slow or fast, so you may as well shove everything as fast as you can into memory. Ipod gained a shit ton of battery life because of that, same with anything that reads spinning media. Like Discmans and MD walkmans.
I used them in my old mini PC shop for converting my smallest thin clients into stand-alones,20 years ago. They were cheaper per MB and more reliable than CF cards even though mechanical as a cheap CF card would often fail during it's first windows install,, and even better quality ones couldn't take more than a few installs (or say going from windows to linux and back to windows).. I learned this the expensive way. I bought 300 second hand microdrives once. about 1 in 20 were duff but I was expecting much worse, and never had any of the thin client conversions back. I was always amazed at how robust they were once installed.
What might also be interesting to note is that IBM contracted a watchmaker to make these (at least in the beginning) because the hard drive producing companies at the time had no experience making such tiny devices.
Hard drives are one of those technologies that are amazing if you don't understand how they work, but become even more amazing once you do
I love these "older" video's about old tech. It's great to see how far we came in those years.
You say "older" but the early 2000's was like 20 years ago that shit IS OLDER 😅
@@batt3ryac1d to be fair technology has changed alot ever since
I personally miss the old wacky days of keypad phones, they got all sorts of shapes and sizes then.
But i understand how that wouldn’t work for smartphones which need to follow standardized shapes to fit the apps they work with.
@@batt3ryac1d 23*
It just makes me feel old when people didn't know about the stuff presented.... 😢😂
@@erik3371 haha I get that, to be fair i'm 28 myself but I grew up with a lot of old tech so i might be on the young side but i'm a chocked as you are when some people don't know what a cassette is.
More these tech history videos would be ABSOLUTELY amazing!
yess!! Linus Tech History.. thats content i'd pay for
"But none of them had the longevity or the cultural impact of the ipod." THIS ZUNE ERASURE WILL NOT STAND!!! 😋 -Daven
Better get Fact Boy to do an episode about the cultural relevance of the Zune, then!
Zune30 still going strong 💪🏻
Zune hd 16 gb still kicking
Cultural impact is not hardware lifespan…
But I’m sure you were at least joking…
Should we expect a TIFO sometime in the future where Simon extols the virtues and development of the Zune?
I remember a guy from IBM who came to our class for a lecture. He said that the hardware people were developing a hard disc the size of a quarter to put a large amount of data to it. It was up to us the software people to work hard and to figure out how to access these large amount of data from these advancing technologies. Lots of math in our software classes (maybe 80% was math).
It's crazy how far we have come with tech.
And how fast.
It's so unreal how far we've come in small form storage. I love it.
Now we have 1TB microSD cards the size of your pinky fingernail! I'm a nostalgia nerd as much as anyone so all these old tech videos are right up my alley but it really gives you an appreciation for the tech we have now.
I still think the ORIGINAL MICRODRIVE cartridge was the best audio and picture form factor, even if it died before digital audio and pictures for the mass market was a thing.. They were dead by the mid 1980s. The SINCLAIR Microdrive Cartridge could only hold about 100kb at the time but if it had progressed along with tape recorder tech. it could have beaten the 3.5'' floppy. It was about 1/6th the size of a 3.5'' floppy.. Came out in 1982/1983...The failed Sinclair QL had a double Microdrive (TM)!
Yeah. However for the smallest sizes there surely needs to be something done for random access performance. Sequential speeds are usually fine for what they are - but bad random access really limits the usefulness. Wish they'd stuck to large SD card size and implemented a proper SSD controller - that would really do wonders. Both performance and longivity. I have a surveilance system which records videos when I'm not a home. There's always a bunch of animals and USB and MicroSD are worn out in a year. And if not worn to the point of error then work enough to be slow as mollasses. Last time I changed local storage (there's also cloud storage but it can run full and in the event it or internet is down) for a proper SSD - just a cheap green WD - about the cheapest I could find and not at all expensive. That one just performs and nowhere near worn down even been in operation for 2-3 years.
Let's take a moment to appreciate IBM for giving proper full sized gigabytes & not cheaping out. It's this little things like this which make you feel warm inside 😊
*cough* samsung
100%!
It's just that IBM people were so techno-focused it simply would never occur to them.
@@Chris.Davies IBM guys listened techno?
Well depends on whats on the sticker GB (10^9 Bytes) or GiB (2^30 Bytes)
The first digital camera I used was floppy based. To get the full 640 resolution you got 11 photos per disc. Had to carry a bunch to take the school formal photos.
Did you know you vuod reformat regular 1.44 MB floppies to be 1.72 MB for free? I remember doing that to squeeze more space out of them, lol
A Mavica?
I remember, in the mid-'90s there was a small hard disk that was maybe the size of a PC card. It was meant for use in a Canon DSLR. Being a professional photo assistant at the time, I went to a workshop where we learned how to use all the new digital gear. It was 640 megs, I think. I think the cheapest pro digital camera outfit we saw that day was $10k US. Some of our employers could afford them, but we could never hope to. I very much miss the scanning backs for view cameras. They simply aren't available anymore.
That’ll be the full-size PC-card format, which was initially developed for storage and only later in development was also intended for peripherals :)
@@kaitlyn__L it might have been, although PC cards were already used for other things. There were modems, ethernet, and a few others. This one actual took two PC card slots that cut away so that you could put it in. People usually didn't use laptops for digital imaging baxk then. The screens didn't give enough color accuracy, and they just weren't powerful enough.
I love these retro-tech videos. The production value is incredibly high for these!
I'm so glad you are doing content on these older techs that changed the way things were done. Its important to know the history of it so we can learn from and appreciate the engineering that made everything we have today possible
11:58 did they blur the hard drive on the right?
@@he8535 Yeah. Maybe some employee was in the background who shouldn't have been on camera?
I remember when these came out and how impressed I was by them. Granted storage space these days is insane, but these are still pretty impressive bits of tech.
aha...like 512 gb/ 1 tb mini-sd cards but with same poor performance due to overheating ;)
@@s.i.m.c.a Nah. Nothing really moving inside those, not in the mechanical sense. Nothing really neat about them aside from their storage space alone. It is the miniaturization of the mechanical stuff that makes these things still pretty impressive. Also the fact that they were designed to be moved around in ways that regular mechanical hard drives are not. Which is something that does not really need to be accounted for with modern flash memory. Not in the way a spinning platter and moving head needs to. Much more akin to the stresses of a laptop hard drive.
Also, keep in mind what other read, write and transfer speeds were prevalent in the 90s and 00s. So, not nearly as big of a hit in performance as similar numbers would be today. Still, it is a pretty valid comparison when thinking about how both work in the real world.
It's crazy to think how much work went into manufacturing so many unbelievably small parts to shrink a drive to that size just to get a couple GB or even a few hundred MB into a 1" space.
Then you fast forward a decade or two and we have drives with 1000GB that are basically a millimetre thick plastic chip the size of a fingernail
watch, in 10yrs we're gonna have Petabyte drives and we'll look back and laugh at our measly 4TB M.2 NVME drives.
It's honestly kinda weird to me that these didn't improve in capacity and/or manufacturing efficiency over the years and just kinda died out.
Then again, current metal platter tech has kinda stagnated a bit in terms of growth.
This has to be one of the cutest "disassemblings" I've seen.loved the contrast between the whispering tone when handling and describing each layer, then the whoops of enthusiasm when matching each part to its enormous brother!
I remember getting a USB version of the Microdrive as a college student! I saw one in the local Computer Hardware shop, thought it was pretty novel (I was 16 at the time...) and bought one. I used the college network for downloading things while in class (Because my home internet was painfully slow) and needed a compact way of getting that back home... These Microdrives were bigger than the USB Flash Drives (128MB was common at the time) and they worked! But, I ended up completely ruined it by not taking care of it. Fun times!
I have a hard drive USB that was a little less wide than a credit card, but yet still thin enough to fit in your palm. Me and brother wondered if other people ever had such a thing and to even see who made the damn thing! To this very day, the tiny hard drive is an absolute mystery to us
Isnt that just a 2.5" hhd
@@alexstromberg7696 Sounds more like an ipod drive.
@@alexstromberg7696 No, I think I know what form factor he's talking about. There were 1.8 inch sized drives in the early-mid 2000s that were used in regular iPods and are also really slim (as they had larger capacity than these micro-HDDs or CF cards at the time). That's how Apple got 30gb into devices like iPod Video which was only 1cm deep, all the way back in 2005.
@@NFMorley For context Microdrive is a 1" drive, and there are some rare toshiba 0.85" drives mostly used in early nokia smartphones.
@@NFMorley I have a 2008 HTC Shift X9500 with a 1.8" 120GB HDD and the original 40GB HDD. The 120GB is clearly thicker than the 40GB one so I guess it has two platters.
They are cool but slow for Windows Vista/7
This was so cool. It aligns perfectly with the rise of digital photography. I remember paying $110 for a 1GB CF card. Honestly even today, my 32GB CF card is impressively fast for how old the standard for it is.
I still have the 8MB CF card of my 1MP camera from 2000, crazy how things changed the last twenty years.
My 4MP Konica-Minolta came with a 16mb card, times have indeed changed.
Retro series are always cool. I love new stuff reviews, but older uncanny and bizarre oddware is so fun to look at. LGR does that so well too
One of the reasons flash memory media dropped so quickly in price in the early 2000s was not just 'the technology maturing', but because like DRAM chips, NAND chips were subject to price fixing shenanigans, but when the DRAM scandal came to light, the NAND market gave up its pricing hijinks as well, considering most companies making one also made the other. RAM and flash media dropped in price at a staggering rate in that time, and it didn't really bottom out until the early 2010s.
Thank you for some of these recent videos that cover tech history. I think these are invaluable at preserving context that the younger generation won’t have experienced.
Wow. That was really interesting. I knew ipods had an HD but assumed they were just ... I guess I didn't give it much thought. Miniaturizing all the components must have been a pretty tricky engineering problem, esp when they had to assume drops and bumpy use over the expected lifespan. Cool!
I loved my 3.5 disk camera. My family had a couple. Not too bad at the time and was very easy to send pictures to family without plugging in the camera or needing some card adapter.
Same here. If I was out taking pictures, I didn't need a laptop to get clear out storage before taking more pictures. At that time you could buy floppies for so cheap you could just pick up another box to have in reserve. I frequently had the leg up on my brother who had a CF camera at the same time.
This is so crazy. Today you have up to 8TB m.2 SSD. Back in the days I had one of the first MP3 Players with 128 MB space. Some guys from my school asked me, where to put the CDs in :D In the last ~20 years so much happened. Cant wait to see what else will happen in the next 20 years.
I had an early Creative Nomad mp3 player. The model with no storage (add your own card) was $100. But the one with 64 MB flash was $300! 😳Wow, how times have changed.
My first digital camera had a microdrive. Actually, the first one I got was faulty - if you held it near your ear you could just hear THAT clicking noise, the classic "hard disk trying to initialise" click of doom. Swapped out under warranty of course, and the next one lived until bigger storage became a thing. Probably still works, not fired it up in a couple of decades tho.
More of this, please. I grew up in the 90s and didn't know so much about this. And thoroughly enjoyed seeing just how far we've come in half a lifetime. Do GPUs next? 😄
You should check out LGR and Techmoan, if you're interested in old tech!
Remember having a Voodoo FX for a bit in college, it was the bomb! But yeah retro GPUs are amazing too.
I had one of those old Sony digital cameras that used floppies for picture storage. It may not be great compared to today, but back then it was terrific.
My friend has a camera that recorded on LS120. That was pretty dope! It's crazy how quickly, and far NAND has progressed after becoming a viable alternative to micro HDD.
I love the informative videos. I would love a video about “computers before you were born” and talk about the major computer moments before 2005 ish.
3:41 I love how they have to specify that "lower is better" on the Dollars per Megabyte chart lol
Man, that sad smiley face at 7:41 made me laugh, such a subtle way of expressing the death of Ipod series.
Microdrives kicked ass! I even held onto my old ones for years, they were pretty tough.
Was so fascinated by those things when they came out.. Amazing to me how they made it so small.
0:23 "Thousands, or even hundreds of files" -Linus 2k23
0:16 Linus: "but what choice did we have"
Film... serious photographers used film back then. the quality of that early digital camera would have been worse than bad
5:48 REMEMBER turn your computer off before midnight of 02/31/99😂😂😂 its on the display behind linus
12:51 I loved the Creative Nomad Jukebox! That thing was fantastic when I was on the ship in the Navy, I didn't need my huge CD binders to hold all the discs. I think it had a 6GB drive in it, which given the low bit-rates we could rip MP3s at the time, it could hold a TON of music.
Was my favorite PMP!
I had one too.
I’m very impressed on the turnaround time for this to be made since Linus mentioned it 😮
I really like these vintage tech videos, please keep them coming! :)
Nokia N91 had a mechanical 0.85" 4GB HDD inside, I think it was the tiniest one ever made.
Pre-ordered the 1GB model when it was announced, for my Canon Powershot camera. All I could tell about it was that it was slightly faster than the flash cards I was comparing it to, and the capacity was vast at the time. And I loved that little whir sound after taking a picture, though you had to have the camera close to your ear to hear it.
When you say "faster" in this context does that mean that you had to wait after each picture some time before you could take the next one?
Do you roughly know how long that was?
@@Jehty_ I believe there was a very brief delay while the camera wrote to the card, but not really that noticeable. I was mainly referring to bulk operations, like when using the microdrive or CF card with a laptop via the PCMCIA slot, moving a lot of images, etc. For just taking single images, it seemed like it was writing the entire image to cache; you weren't stuck waiting while the disk was still spinning. (My recall is pretty fuzzy; it's been a long time.)
@@manualdidact 🤣 now I feel like an idiot. Somehow I didn't think about moving the pictures.
Thanks :)
I love the fact that I seen all these tech changes growing up really makes me appreciate the read and write speeds we have now
Now we have to choose between ~3,500 MBps or ~7,000 MBps. I’m building a new mini ITX setup for my living room, and trying to convince my wife to go with gen 4 PCIe is difficult…
@@mouthwash884 Gen5 coming... eventually.
It's mildly irratating for me if someone complains about a 5gb update and say it is super slow.
Back when adsl arrived in my country we could only use 5GB per month.
now we're complaining about Apple skimping on SSD controllers on base M2 Macs so they only get sub 2 GB/s read/write speeds 🐌
I always loved these. Pretty cool to see one get opened up, mine still function and I wouldn't dare open one. It's so cute!
3:08 I hadn't seen that image icon in decades!
I used to have one of those little square Creative MP3 players, and hearing (and feeling!) that little microdrive seeking was always a surreal experience - just knowing that there was a tiny, fully functional hard drive squeezed in there somewhere.
I remember my mother upgrading from a Polaroid camera to a floppy disk camera for work back in 1999,I found it in the attic last year and I think the picture resolution was 640x480
Honestly, I was expecting it to be way more potato than that. Neat!
@@Nick-ds6oc when there where a think anytthing have floppy dive, last one I saw it using hd disk, the 720 where still a thing back then, (don't no, but would get, if could use 720 fat) formatted floppy, almost any machine with floppy 3.5 drive could read the floppy images, of the disk, even more convenient, flapping SD-cards today
@@Nick-ds6oc There was a higher resolution model but she didn't want to spend the money for it
( 10:58 ) Linus: it's even smaller and cuter than I thought ... No, that's what she said.
I'm sorry, Linus. :(
CF cards are technically IDE ATA (technically PATA), which is an extension of the upper bits of 16bit ISA and it remotely follows the MFM harddrive protocols from the AT PS2 era. PCMCIA just used the same standard. You can passively convert CF cards to IDE without requiring any controller and it works fine on older machines.
11:49 "don't talk to me or my son ever again"
3:06 I have exactly the same 340 MB microdrive that I bought around the year 2000 to 2002. It is still working, and I keep it in my drawer.
During that time, the largest flash storage media were 128 MB, such as 128 MB SmartMedia cards and 128MB Sony Memory Sticks. Colleagues around me were surprised when they saw the 340 MB microdrive. Everyone would say, 'Wow! You have such a large drive!‘
I remember those 1" micro drives. They were great and led to the 1.8" drives that powered the iPod years later.
I have a laptop with one of those 1.8" iPod hard drives.
I think the 1.8“ drives were earlier but with the 5th gen of iPods they managed to shrink them further
The 1.8" drives are amazing if you think about it. The 40GB iPod Classic came out 20 years ago. And yet now you can still get like 32-64GB Phones. The 160 GB iPod came out 15 years ago. The current iPhone and Galaxy still have a 128 GB Model for 800 bucks. If you told someone 15 years ago that their iPhone in 15 years might have less storage than their iPod now, I don't think they would've believed it. Sure the storage got smaller and faster and you can get 512gb options for a lot more money but the fact that the base models are still in that region is kinda weird.
No the only iPod to use 1" microdrive was the iPod Mini. All other iPods use 1.8 Drives. 1st - 4th gen uses ZIF connectors and later models use micro sata
As sure as I am that videos about new and expensive tech are more fun to make and likely make more money I really enjoy this type of retrospective look at hardware that take you through the advancements that certain technology has made over the years, makes you appreciate what we have now just that little bit more.
That was very interesting. Be nice to see more of these 'old tech' videos.
My school had a few floating around the photography department. The teacher in charge actually convinced the principal at the time to buy a bunch of flash cards (because students+moving drives don't mix), but the cameras they bought came with them anyway. By the time I got there, they were sort of irrelevant, but why throw out something if it can be used?
Trusted students were allowed to borrow equipment over term breaks or the weekend etc. and usually they got given the microdrives rather than the flash drives.
That tiny cf hard drive is really a engineering marvel. Fact that people of earth built that small spinning storage back then is amazing.
I bought a Sony Mavica around December, and it's been really interesting to work with, strategizing how to fit images on Floppies has a fun novelty in the modern age
Love these videos looking back at retro tech! Keep em' coming :)
It was so cool back in the day to feel my iPod's hard drive spin up inside it. Solid state memory is hands down better, but man, there was a charm to that.
One thing you forgot to mention, is that people normally use harddrives over flash because of their reliability.
And what people quickly realised is that these tiny drives weren't necessarily as reliable as their larger counterparts so therefore offered very little advantages over flash technology.
I had microdrives clearly wear out and get corrupted the more they were used, which is basically the same problem as flash has.
When Linus held up the two hard drives, all that came to mind was this quote: "Mini Me, you complete me.". Then cued up the song "Just the two of us"...
I had a Creative Zen Micro with a microdrive! The thing was incredible at the time.
Chances are you have already done it, but if not, I’d love a deep dive on how USB replaced older systems like serial.
USB didn't replace serial, it is serial. Universal Serial Bus. It unified the standard
People still use serial, and it is easy to plug in the correct way on the first try.
c'mon.. it's not THAT tiny.. i'd say it's average sized :/
Just a fun fact, air bus a320 and 321s still use pcmcia cards to store flight data and every 10 days gets swapped out for a fresh one while the old info is dumped for data collection then wiped clean to be used again
I'm heading into the garage to grab my defunct LifeDrive, extract the mini-drive, strip it, and display it in a little picture frame, alongside my old CPUs and 512-Byte 2114 memory modules from my OSI Superboard II.
I wonder how large capacity a modern microdrive could hit considering how far HDD density has come!
Probably could get near half a terabyte or even a terabyte.
my first usb flash drive was $120 and held 1GB.
And it still works 18 years later.
I still have my first usb flash drive, a 1GB Verbatim. It was very expensive, but I wanted to be able to store a CD image in it! Back in the day it was mindblowing... A few years later they were giving them away for free, I have a Coca Cola branded one.
Wow 1Gig in 2005? That must have been fucking expensive. I still have an 256MB Apacer Steno from that time and it already cost over 100 bucks back then...
@@Setsuna_Kyoura My first drive was a 2GB A-Data and it died in a few years. Then I got a 4GB OCZ which used a dual channel flash controller to achieve higher speeds. It actually maxed out USB 2. It was very expensive for the time. About $200, which could have bought a 16GB drive. But this drive, I could full read/write in 5 minutes vs. the several hours it would take to actually transfer 16GB on the cheaper drive.
And after a million drops and even a few washing machine cycles, it still works today. And - in terms of speed, at least - it's actually still very competitive with modern commodity drives.
Storage capacity-vs-cost has continued to plummet. I just bought a 512GB M.2 SSD for sixty bucks new.....
My first flash drive cost $250 and had a capacity of 256MB. It was the top-of-the-line drive of the time though, brushed aluminum case and supported a full USB1 write speed. ;)
@@Setsuna_Kyoura it was stupid expensive, I can't recall exactly what the exchange rate was, but I must have paid close to $200 USD. It was so stupid expensive that for most stuff I used smaller 64/128mb sticks to avoid wear on the 1GB one... I didn't get to use it that much before they were giving away 1GB sticks for free...
I love videos like this. Interesting tech that, in hindsight, were just stop gaps to where we ended up today.
It's crazy to think how far we've come in such a short period of time. As an example, 5 cents per MB to 10 cents per GB and beyond for flash... Absolutely wild.
Had one of these in a Nintendo DS media player back in the day, didn't appreciate how novel they were at the time!
My dad was an "IBM Partner" when these were launched and they were handing out little Microdrive sized chocolate mints wrapped to look like little Microdrives.
I’ve been unironically been carrying around a Sony Mavica fd-91 since 2019 to take photos with a vintage look. There’s something so charming about loading colorful floppies into it in front of a bunch of strangers. Keeping up with the Joneses is why we live in a throwaway world when everything constantly changes
I still have my Mavica somewhere, too. I need to dig it out and see if it still works. I loved that camera, and took some pretty great photos with it.
My first graphic design and digital communication class was done on cameras. The photography teachers themselves vocally spoke out against digital cameras.
what's wrong with digital? do non digital cameras even exist nowadays?
i remember my dad and i were into photography but i was actually more into computers.. him and i realized this exact thing and i took one apart myself as well years back. crazy stuff
I actually have a broken one somewhere in my room, my dad was an amateur photographer in the 90s to early 2000s. Makes a little rattle noise when it’s moved lol. I think it’s beyond saving but I wish I could.
I actually was only vaguely aware of the micro drive. I was fully expecting some talk of the 1.5 mini drive that I had encountered in some laptops so this was pretty cool. Especially the take apart
I had one of these a professional photographer friend gave it to me. He tried to use these, and they were a fail. They couldn't tolerate even the lightest bumps or jostles, like cameras often get. They also were power hungry. They were bigger than other memory at the time, but only a bit and that advantage was short lived.
7:55 na-no
Hello, fellow DankPods engoyer
To think that we used to load games off of such slow storage devices. Obviously SSDs have gotten really good lately, but still.
Games were much smaller in size back then so it wouldn't be too bad
Level loading speed significantly improved, but game performance overall stayed the same besides some stutter in low number of games
what do you mean, i started off with magnetic tapes on zx80, and i dont consider myself old
except... you know... we didn't.....
the thing is you didnt really know, since all the loading times just were like this. but play some old games on an old pc and it will just drive you nuts, i guarantee it :D
These are some of my favorite videos. Historic, nostalgic memories, and comparing to the current.
@8:06 Had two of those Creative Nomad MuVo² 4GB size, where the next biggest CF was 512 MB with much higher price
Just learned today LTT doesn't let workers discuss wages. WTF?
nokia n91 has a HDD in it
The best example of this is the HDD inside the ipod classic and mini. There was also a Nokia phone (N91) that had one of those.
Remember Linus talking about making a video about this couple days ago in the biggest dell laptop video. Thought they’d forget
I don't know why but I think these mini drives are so cute.
I remember having one of these 340mb ones that came with a cannon camera. Had totally forgotten about them...
Somewhere around me here, is a SparQ Drive, which was usually seen with 300/400MB HDD cassettes. The one I have has a removable 1GB HDD Cassette with the cutest little platter! It was configured for W95/98 which was, back then, using internal HDD's with 300/400MB capacity. The guy who gave me it(wasn't it always thus...!) said that the SparQ Drive could hold all he had on his PC of the time. It was read to through the printer port and sat between PC and Printer...but I don't have the funky power cable or the Comm connectors and cables...(over-enthusiastic clear up) Nice one Linus and the team! Cheers!
0:23 thousands or even HUNDREDS of files ;)
So, amongst a lot of professional photographers of the day (I worked as assistant at the tail end of high school in 2003-2004) did not trust these things. They had a bad habit of dying and taking all of your valuable photos with them. Flash based drives were so much more reliable. The large factor besides what you mentioned (Moore's law, minimum cost for a hard drive) was that these were always viewed a little suspect, and once flash was even vaguely competitive, most photography magazines and pros recommended abandoning them.
Fact! They were not very shock resistant. All the walking, sudden aiming, bumps, etc and of course shooting didn't lend well to them surviving for too long.
I just got into DAPs so storage is everything when your music library is crazy
It is worth noting that there were two different thicknesses of CF cards, 3.3 mm "Type 1" and 5 mm "Type II". The Microdrive was a Type II (thicker) card, and not all cameras would accept it in their card slot. I remember that the first digital camera I bought, the Canon G2, was one that did support both thicknesses of CF card.
The G2 could be set to output raw-format images instead of JPEGs, and with raw image files being about 50% larger than the highest-quality JPEGs, the extra storage space was important.