I am going to buy a microdrive, it seems a lot of them were pulled from iPod.
Just want to know if I can still use these microdrive from iPod in retro PC?
If they are different, can I somehow update the firmware and change them to retail version?
Thanks.
I have one seagate wirh the apple logo in it and work like a normal drive
sangokushi wrote on 2023-06-23, 18:46:I am going to buy a microdrive, it seems a lot of them were pulled from iPod. […]
I am going to buy a microdrive, it seems a lot of them were pulled from iPod.
Just want to know if I can still use these microdrive from iPod in retro PC?
If they are different, can I somehow update the firmware and change them to retail version?Thanks.
I have two IBM 1GB with the PCMCIA adapter. They are a wonderful piece of engineering. I keep them mostly because i always wanted to have one since they came out.
But performances are not great.
Barely usable as a main hard drive.
Industrial flash based CF cards tends to perform better.
Phil's video about microdrives as main hard drive.
https://youtu.be/YvDfqjBUCA8
"Hello, my friend. Stay awhile and listen..."
My collection (not up to date)
About the usability take note that the microdrive stopped the disc after one second of no access it, every time it spin-up the disk causing an huge lag every time you ask for a written o reader on the disc. is ok for a system very very old, i used it on the amiga that load the game in ram and not use the microdrive anymore.
There are indeed some crippled OEM microdrives from when an iPod Mini (yes, the one by Apple!!!) and comparable products were cheaper than a retail disk, but IIRC the difference is that they got rid of CF modes - full IDE mode used by mechanical adapters works fine since, well, that's what the HDD iPods use* 😀
* except for some of the 6.5G Classics - they have a funny/failed "CE-ATA" disk interface, but they can still use plain IDE ones if you replace the cable with the right kind
All, thank you so much! Seems I should buy a CompactFlash card instead.
