John, it all depends on how they hit the ground. If they hit close to
flat, they'll easily survive. Edge hits are quite different, and will
often kill a microdrive.
Also the most common drive on the market today, the MagicStor 2.2GB, is
extraordinarily flimsy (note this is NOT an IBM/Hitachi unit).
-Adam
John Francis wrote:
On Thu, Nov 10, 2005 at 11:31:09AM -0500, Adam Maas wrote:
Mark Roberts wrote:
I haven't heard any reports of microdrives being delicate. Have you
experienced many failures?
Not personally as I do not use them. . . .
A Flash card can be dropped several feet onto concrete without damage. A
Microdrive will be killed by a much smaller drop more often than not.
Yet again, FUD is spread by people with no personal experience.
"More often than not"? As in, more than 50% of the time? Untrue.
A Microdrive is rated for G forces that would destroy your camera,
yet people love to imply that they are ridiculously fragile devices.
I used Microdrives for two years. In that time I spent quite a bit
of time in the company of professional photojournalists, all of whom
depend on their cameras for their daily income. Despite that, even
though they routinely treat their cameras in a way that would make
most of us cringe, they continued to use Microdrives on occasion long
after big CF cards were available.
The biggest risk to the original (IBM-branded) 340MB and 1GB drives,
and the early Hitachi 1GB units, was careless handling. Squeezing
the wrong part of the case too hard as you were extracting the unit
could misalign the heads. Hitachi redesigned the mechanism for the
2GB & 4GB units, providing better support on the outer edge (and,
I believe, moving the head assembly to the edge with the connector).
That being said, however, I've now relegated my (1GB) Microdrives to
the role of occasional reserve; they've been replaced in day-to-day
use by a couple of 2GB CF cards. They are cheap enough that the
cost per GB advantage of larger Microdrives isn't important, and in
any case I think 2GB (around 150 RAW files) is a good compromise;
I don't like having too many eggs in one basket.
