Yes they are quite slow. 3000 something rpm and small circumference.

Smaller the drive, the faster the access time, and the slower you need to spin it. They can be fairly speedy if they are made well. That of course depends on the ATA transfer rate that it can use.

I would imagine for things like iPod use, they aren't insanely fast for just needing to load MP3s into memory, but you can use it if you want.

But my bottom line suggestion is use real hard drives if you can. For me they provide an element of vintage computing that you lose with flash memory. It's hard to explain, but what it comes down to is that with the noise, vibration, and even annoyance of a hard drive in a laptop or desktop, the slowness, that is something special that belongs to that computer. That's how it was, and that's part of the historical/nostalgic experience that you lose when you use flash memory. I have 0 interest in CF/SD to ATA adapters for anything.

It's your ultimate decision what to do, but if you can use a real drive, you should imo.

I'm really just after past experiences with Microdrives, whether they're useful or too slow. If it really is 3000 RPM or so, I may as well just spend $15 and get a 40GB 1.8" IDE 4200rpm HDD. It may be slow but it's not like IDE on a Pentium M system is all that fast to begin with, probably won't be much different from a Sandisk Extreme CF card.

Ampera wrote:

Smaller the drive, the faster the access time, and the slower you need to spin it. They can be fairly speedy if they are made well. That of course depends on the ATA transfer rate that it can use.

So what access time and transfer rates are you getting with your micro drives?

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Ampera wrote:

Smaller the drive, the faster the access time, and the slower you need to spin it. They can be fairly speedy if they are made well. That of course depends on the ATA transfer rate that it can use.

So what access time and transfer rates are you getting with your micro drives?

I am referring to small drives in general. Smaller drives at high RPMs are always faster than larger drives at the same rotation speed because it takes less distance for the heads to move. If the drive has a good head, and the controller is fast enough, it will perform better than a full sized drive. If the RPM is so slow that it doesn't give benefit, or if the controller isn't fast enough, then it will not be slower.

Ampera wrote:

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Ampera wrote:

Smaller the drive, the faster the access time, and the slower you need to spin it. They can be fairly speedy if they are made well. That of course depends on the ATA transfer rate that it can use.

So what access time and transfer rates are you getting with your micro drives?

I am referring to small drives in general. Smaller drives at high RPMs are always faster than larger drives at the same rotation speed because it takes less distance for the heads to move. If the drive has a good head, and the controller is fast enough, it will perform better than a full sized drive. If the RPM is so slow that it doesn't give benefit, or if the controller isn't fast enough, then it will not be slower.

Not necessarily. What you say is true when you "short-stroke" a drive by partitioning it to a smaller capacity than it's rate for. But compare an 80gig to 160gig of the same drive model, both actuator arms have the same platter size to navigate. One just has an extra platter and read head. There's a tiny bit of advantage to the single platter 80GB because one platter takes less energy to spin than two, but that is negligible.

Access times and transfer rates are important, but firmware can play a huge role too with read-ahead and caching algorithms.

notsofossil wrote:

Ever since my Thinkpad X40 running XP SP2 on a 32GB CF card mysteriously developed a broken USB driver problem, I've been bummed out and a bit more wary about seriously using flash memory.

Not that anyone cares, but much to my dismay, my Thinkpad X40 has a dead USB controller. Using another OS made no difference and using a "USB cardbus" adapter worked. At least I have one of those, still sucks that the two internal USB ports are broken. It means I can't have a 32GB CF card in the PC card slot anymore. At least the SD card still works...

Concerning the topic, I tried installing Windows ME on a Pentium M system using the 4GB Microdrive, it wasn't noticeably slower than usual hard drive installs. If only Microdrives could fit in regular CF card slots, I'd love to use it on that Toshiba Portege I have with the missing screen. I could actually install XP on a system like that.