CRAIGFIN

Has anybody got one of these?

I am thinking of getting one for my digital camera, but have read that they drain the battery really quickly. Can anybody confirm this? What are your experiences?

Cheers,

Craig.

LoFi

I have a 0.5gig drive and it seems ok on batteries

LoFi

CRAIGFIN

LoFi,

Thanks for the reply. Can you confirm that they are capable of recording video footage as well?

Cheers,

Craig.

avonvilla

i have a 1 gig drive, dont bother with normal cards anymore, i found they are slightly quicker than the cards i tried and use about 25% more power but overall well worth it, they do viseo just like a card.

CRAIGFIN

Avonvilla,

Just what I needed to know, cheers.

Craig.

avonvilla

no prob

IWatkins

I've had two 1Gb Microdrives and had nothing but trouble with them. First one would drain power like nothing else.

The second (replacement) would sometimes fail to start and you had to power the camera off and back on again to start it.

I switched to solid state cards and have had no problems. OK, the bigger ones are more expensive than the microdrives, but there isn't a lot to go wrong with them.

Cheers

Ian

LoFi

Sorry Ian, I beg to differ. Solid state cards do fail, alot. I have had more trouble with failing SM cards and type I CF cards than I care to list, and they're slow. I know a couple of people with microdrives and they have had no problems.

LoFi

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

I have one - I've used it regularly for the last couple of years with no only one problem, namely that it didn't react too well to being written to whilst being bounced around on horseback! Even that only resulted in a corrupt image - the drive was OK after a format. I've not noticed any excess power drain either; you can save an awful lot more power by getting used to using the optical viewfinder rather than the LCD all the time. It's the LCD that really kills the battery.

I think some of the problems are just incompatibilities - the Microdrive is a Compact Flash Plus Type II card, and it does have higher power requirements than a regular Compact Flash card (type I or II). Some cameras are designed to support it, some aren't. (It sounds like there may be some production issues with the drive too).

Andy.

Fatman

CF cards can make far fewer read-writes than microdrives, but have the benefit of using less power.

avonvilla

i did a lot of research before i bought mine about a year ago and it seemed to me there were a lot more flash card problems than microdrive faults, the speed is quite a lot also, i did a few tests and found the microdrive was up to twice as quick as cards.

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

Fatman, industry standard endurance for a consumer grade CF card is 300,000 cycles.

Last year I took about 25,000 photos - wearing out the shutter in my D30 in the process - yet in order to wear out a CF card I'd have needed to take more than ten times as many, AND store them all in the same location on the same card.

In short, they simply won't wear out. They'll be well obsolete first.

Beastie

iTrader: (2)

I have 340MB microdrive and Canon Powershot G1. No probs and I have taken thousands of videos and pictures over the last 3 years with them.

alistair

The advantage of microdrives used to be capacity - no the solid state cards have overtaken them I really can't see a benefit in having moving parts.

As for speed........some reviews here

AndyC_772

iTrader: (2)

There's another database of CF cards and their speed in various cameras here - look under 'CF Database'.

The advantage of Microdrives was really price/MB. Although their price advantage has dropped, they're still roughly half the cost of a reasonably fast solid state card. They're available up to 4GBytes too now, although most cameras can't use above 2.