It's a fact: in the world of storage capacity, bigger is better. But when it comes to portability, small and light is the way to go. Hitachi's Microdrive 3K4 digital media marries... more
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A review by Gadgit on Hitachi Microdrive 3K4 4 GB January 18th, 2005
Author's product rating:
Memory / capacity
Excellent
Reliability
Excellent
Ease of Installation
Excellent - very quick and easy
Speed
Very fast
Value For Money
Satisfactory
Advantages:
Very small for Data Capacity, Fast Transfer Rate
Disadvantages:
Drains Batteries, Moving parts
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
The best thing about this is that it’s cool, 4gb all in a thing an inch and a half wide! It’s amazing! The disadvantage to this, however, is the price, in comparison you’re getting 4gb for £179, for that price and only 2 ½ inches wider you could have nearly 300gb! But who cares? It’s small! This great little device works find in most card readers, and the transfer rate is astonishing, I use it for my mp3 player, and it transfers about 10 albums in under 5 minutes on USB 1.1, now that’s not bad! I imagine it would be faster still on USB 2.0.
The thing that worries me with these Microdrives is that they are mini-hard drives. This means that you have very small disks in there spinning very fast, and I’m sure that can’t be too much of a good idea. However, this hasn’t been a problem for me so far, I’ve not exactly treated mine extremely carefully, and once sort of there it on my desk while still in the card reader, and it still goes fine.
The problem with these small disks is that of course they need small motors too, and these in turn do use up a lot more power than solid state memory. This is noticeable, were in my mp3 player the battery is stated to last twice as long with a CF card rather than a Microdrive.
The next best thing of all is that you needn’t pay £175 for one of these; you can, as I did, get one for only £139 with an mp3 player! You need to look for the NEX IA+ by Frontier Labs, it’s a great little player suited perfectly to the drive. I think there may however, be some issues with the drive’s compatibility in camera’s, when I tried it in my friend’s Cannon Powershot A75 the card did not fit as it was too deep for the slot, so I’m not too sure what the problem is there, it would be worth finding out before spending all that money. Other than that I would say that this is a great little drive, and well worth the £139 I paid for it with an mp3 player. Although I would need a very good reason to buy one for £175. Haven’t had any problems with mine, so if you need one, off you go!
Note: The Mp3 Player deal was on at the time of writing, but I doubt it’ll be on forever!
Features: Giant magnetoresistive (GMR) head technology, load/unload technology, No-ID, Enhanced Adaptive Battery Life Extender 3.0, TrueTrack servo technology, Giant magnetoresistive (GMR) head technology, load/unload technology, TrueTrack servo technology, Enhanced Adaptive Battery Life Extender
Performance
Drive Transfer Rate: 33 MBps (external) / 12.2 MBps (internal)
Seek Time: 12 ms (average) / 22 ms (max)
Track-to-Track Seek Time: 1 ms
Average Latency: 8.33 ms
Spindle Speed: 3600 rpm
Reliability
Non-Recoverable Errors: 1 per 10^13
Start / Stop Cycles: 300,000
Expansion / connectivity
Compatible Slots: 1 x CompactFlash Card - type II, 1 x CompactFlash Card
Environmental parameters
Min Operating Temperature: 0 °C
Max Operating Temperature: 70 °C
Humidity Range Operating: 8 - 90%
Shock Tolerance: 200 g @ 2ms half-sine pulse (operating) / 2000 g @ 1ms (non-operating), 200 g @ 2ms half-sine pulse (operating) / 2000 g @ 1ms half-sine pulse (non-operating)
Vibration Tolerance: 0.67 g @ 5-500 Hz (operating) / 3.01 g @ 5-500 Hz (non-operating)
Max Altitude Operating: 3 km
Manufacturer's product description
It's a fact: in the world of storage capacity, bigger is better. But when it comes to portability, small and light is the way to go. Hitachi's Microdrive 3K4 digital media marries its go-anywhere size to 4 GB's of record-it-all storage. No bigger than a matchbook and just as light, the Microdrive will fit 75 hours of high-quality music into the change pocket of your jeans. Or swap out all those songs for a DVD movie. At 2GB, it's four times bigger than its predecessor and much more economical than standard flash memory. More capacity means more photos, more music, more data, and more possibilities. Hitachi's Microdrive 3K4 provides cost-effective personal storage. Weighing just over half an ounce (16 grams) and about the size of a matchbook, Hitachi's Microdrive continues to reign as the world's smallest hard disk drive. This drive uses ultra-miniaturized components, including Hitachi's femto slider technology, which enables higher capacities and better power efficiency. With a maximum sustained data rate of over 7MB/sec, Hitachi's 4GB Microdrive is the fastest product of its kind. No other product on the market offers a better combination of storage capacity, portability, compact size, performance and affordability. The arrival of a 4GB capacity also enables and delivers a cost-effective solution for running complex operating systems in embedded applications, or portable digital devices like PDAs and handheld PCs.
Having recently had a breakdown on my Samsung U3 I opted for the K3 instead. So far I have to say I made the right decision.
INTRO
The first thing that you notice about the K3 is how cool it looks. I spent weeks looking at MP3 players and was... more
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