0:38 3.5" SL drives like you show here didn't become common until the early 90s. The 3.5" drive that was introduced in 1983 was the Rodime RO252, which was HH, or double the size of that drive. It displaced half height 5.25" drives which were introduced just the year before by Microscience International as the HH-612. Only two years before that, the Seagate ST-506, the first 5.25" hard drive at all was introduced. The ST-506 replaced the IBM 62PC Piccolo of 1979, which was an 8" drive ,the first of it's kind. Technology during that era was moving scarily fast. The Rodime RO252 is a 10MB drive, just 3 years earlier a drive 4x the height stored half the data. 0:52 The 2.5" drive introduced in 1988 was the PrairieTek Prairie 120, which was twice the height of the Toshiba you showed. It was the smallest production hard drive in the world at the time of it's introduction. Thinner drives came a few years later, but this "Full height" 2.5 inch form factor was still relevant for enterprise applications until the mid 2000s. 1:21 The first 1.8" hard disk drive was the Integral Viper, in 1993. It was a PC Card, and they were popular for mobile data storage long before the iPod hit shelves. 5:50 The IBM Microdrive isn't "Basically" a Compact Flash card, it IS a compact flash card. It was intentionally designed to be interface and socket compatible. Most devices which support one will support the other. The Microdrive hit production in 1999 and it was the world's smallest production hard drive. You could get original Microdrives in capacities of up to 340MB on a single 1" platter. 11:28 The Toshiba MK4001MTD and MK8003MTD, the smallest hard drives in the world. 4 and 8GB, respectively. I believe they really do use an SD card interface.

Holy crap! The platter inside that SD-sized HDD must be the size of a penny! That's the most impressive thing I've ever seen! Especially for a mechanical device.

MP3 player: Often dropped or subjected to shocks and abuse. Apple: Lets put a HDD in one!

There was a time (around the beginning of this century) when I was using a "MASSIVE" 340MB microdrive in my DSLR - the largest solid state ones were 32MB tops at the time I think. I was always humbled knowing that there is a tiny plate spinning inside the CF enclosure... My wallet had also been humbled.

“It’s unusual to see the apple and Samsung logo together.” Almost the whole iPhone: haha they will never notice.

we need mini storage servers of 64 GB using 16 mini 4 GB drives!

The Nokia N91 part was so much educational to me even today its feelsso awesome that this kinda technology is retrofutureproof

i never even knew hdd's even were that tiny

the N91 phone actually came out in 2005,and the 8GB revision in 2007

Awwwwww!!!! 😍😍😍😍😍 That tiny little hard drive is just so cute!!!!

I have a MicroSD card in my laptop that's 512GB (genuine). I find it mind blowing that something the size of a fingernail can store that much data and more!

Never thought how small HDD can get back in the day, very interesting piece of engineering they achieved

The Seagate ST3290A you show at the start was a mid 90s drive, so yes bringing it to the mid 80s would be witchcraft. The capacity of that drive eclipses anything money could buy in the 5.25" form factor and most, if not all 8" mechanisms as well.

I'm having Nokia N91 4GB version since 2006. Without any doubt its amazing phone with Supreme Music Experience. Phone stil works perfect except a little bit blurry display. I didn't know that I'm carrying a moving mechanical hard disk with me all the time, and that's world's tiniest HDD! Wow... feels great!!

This clip is more like a leap through time... almost forgot I'm in no good 2021 good old days..miss u so much😌😌😌

It would be cool if they made transparent mechanical hard drives and I can see why they can't for obvious reasons but bright metal, spinning disks and oscillating read arms are aesthetically pleasing to me.

I had a 12 GB micro drive in thumb drive form back in the day. They announced a 16 GB model, but terminated the line before releasing it.

Really liked this video. Crazy how small things go in a relatively short space of time. Unbelievable that tiny drive was inside a phone.. nice to hear the Nokia boot sequence again.. been a long time.. Looking forward to seeing that spinning drive usb stick :) Nice work 👍

Oh my heck, watching that tiny little arm swing on the Microdrive while it's just sitting there plugged into that USB card reader you're holding is... kind of mind-blowing! I've known about Microdrives since right about when they came out about 2 decades ago, but they're still mind-blowing to me all these years later. But then you just said that now it's the SECOND-smallest, OMG!

The Cowon iAudio6 had just such an 0.85" hard drive in it. The device was small enough that you could easily feel it move a little bit when it spun up.

It's really amazing to the evolution of hard drive tech and see how much it has changed in such a short time!

What an amazing history lesson this video was. Kind thanks, dear sir!

4GB in a phone back in 2004 is actually HUGE It's like having 1TB today

I enjoy these types of videos so much. Thank you for sharing your collection with us!

My favourite little drives are the 1 inch voice coil units in Compact Flash form factor, manufactured by Seagate and Hitachi also for camera use. They generally hold up to 8Gb. My first drive in about 1987 was a 5.25 Miniscribe 3053 voice coil with 3 platters giving 40MB capacity. It made the most superb sounds when seeking that were easily audible while using the 80286 12MHz PC running MS-DOS 3.X.

Great video these days.. Thanks buddy!

I have heard about the microdrives before, but I never knew that even smaller formfactors existed. The size of that "nanodrive" seems similar to a modern XQD/CFe card, which are also sucessors to the old CF standart. Also this is the best overview about these rare hard drives I have seen so far!

"I just happen to have one handy" - That about sums up this video. GREAT content. You pull out examples of each thing you talk about and you take some interesting ones to bits. Subscription Achievement Unlocked.

this was great I was trying to find some vids on 1.8" HDD. Thank you!

1.8" HDD... that give me PTSD... I had to repair Macbook air that had that form farctor HDD... And I really had problem to find that at that time lol

Those tiny drives are so small, the mechanical bits are entering watchmaker territory! I wonder how durable they were compared to today's HDDs.

I have fond memories of holding my iPod mini up to my ear in fascination with the mechanical sounds it made. I still have it’s drive sitting in the top drawer of my desk.

14:52 infinite available space in phone is handy :)

WOW, that sub-1-inch hard disk would blow my mind even MORE than a Microdrive if I could see it open and running, OMG! But being able to see that photo is pretty cool!

great comparisons. Never seen such small drives. Only knew about the apple ipod drives as smallest.

Great video! Absolutely loved this! New sub now. Can't wait to learn more from you. Thank - you for everything!

Very cool and informative. Thanks!

I found this video very interesting. thank you.

Thanks for this video. Very informative

Very interesting video about drives and how they look inside!

Thank you very much sir, that was a really broad and informative review. I like it.

thanks for the efforts

It's funny, because that SD card size disk, could be read on a real SD card slot

Great video. I had no idea some of these drives existed.

10:19 The battery is bigger than the drive!!

9:50 that put a smile on my face

OMG! That is the cutest and tiniest hard drive I have ever seen!

Wow! VERY enlightening 👍🏿

Normally, I would've been sad, not getting to see what's inside that tiny NOKIA drive. But I like that you didn't destroy it. We don't get these anymore

thanx man for this video I'll share it on my FB page with your channel link

so absolutly incredable.

Nokia still amazes me to this day. Thank you for making this video.

The Palm LifeDrive had a 4Gb Microdrive in it as well, I remember thinking it was so crazy that a handheld had a spinning drive in it and when I saw some pictures of the Microdrive partially disassembled in a magazine it seemed even more futuristic.

I recently found a 1.8" drive when I was scrapping some broken laptops for useful parts. I thought it was small but that little .85 inch is tiny!

Nice presentation.

Thank you so so much for this video 🥰🥳🥳🎉🎉👍🏻👌🏻✌🏻

this is amazing stuff

Epic ad placement timing ☺️

nice video! really educative!

2:05 - trust me (I've worked on the insides of a lot of Macs since the 80s), it's really not that unusual at all. Apple often order parts from suppliers like Samsung to meet certain specs and the parts are adorned with both logos. Many models of HD were also made for Apple with custom ROMs on the drives too (again, always dual-logo).

I remember when they put spinning hard drives in a compact flash form factor...was pretty amazing for it's time!

I have a couple of working Hitachi Microdrives (non-Apple) and I always thought they were the smallest. Interesting vid :-)

Wonderful 👍😎 I share your enthusiasm.

God damn you have some really nostalgic treasure out there😘😘😘

I had an RCA MP3 player circa 2005 with the 1 inch microdrive. At the time I don't think I fully appreciated how cool that was but looking back on it, I am very impressed. In almost all areas, the "analog" or "gen 1" versions of products always seems more technically impressive than their successor (CRT > LCD) (HDD > SSD) etc. The original formats had a certain degree of magic and mystique to them that was subsequently replaced by cold, logical, and efficient technologies.

Very fortunate to see those tiny hdd. I didn't even know Nokia was using hdd on their phones.

Amazing video

Awesome video :D

Hats off ! 👍👏

Even if mechanical drives and devices get replaced by non-mechanic alternatives wich way faster and better, I find them very fascinating. My old Camcorder also still has a 30 GB HDD built in :)

It's kinda crazy that you can fit more than a terabyte of flash memory into the same volume as the 0.85 inch drive nowadays.

In the IBM XT a 10 Megabyte drive became available. It was about 6 inches wide, 4 inches high, and 8 inches long. Today you can get a 1 Terabyte drive that is a bit larger than a credit card. The 1 terabyte drive will store as much data as 100,000 of those 10 Megabyte drives!! I recall seeing a hard drive at a reclamation site that had 10 platters (disks) that were about 3 feet in diameter! It also had 8 separate heads and head actuators on each side of each platter.

Great video man I want that small hdd

Thx, Never knew that there is something like 1.8 inch hhd before watching this video.

Datel released a 4gb hard drive for the Sony PSP, and that was absolutely tiny.

I love that 1.8" drive xd It looks like a model, but actually works

Thanks for sharing. 😉👌🏻

Cabaret Voiltaire used as a test track.... i approve

Your channel is a hidden gem. Subscribed.

I used to actually own a 1 inch portable usb hdd I got from Office max. I think it may have been a Seagate, but I can't find a reference to it ANYWHERE on google. It was about 1.5 x 1.25 inches square white plastic, had a built in usb cable that you slotted into it for storage, and had this little white fake leather pouch with a clear plastic window in the center to store it in. Wish I could find it for photos and model number.... but it was like....late 2003-2004. Somewhere around then.

I had quite a few external SCSI drives back in the day. I had one from a company called Frog (based in Scotland!) The large external SCSI enclosure housed a 2.5" SCSI interfaced HDD with an adapter to the normal "Centronics" style external SCSI connector. It dawned on me at the time that it wasn't an economical way of creating an external SCSI hard drive. When manufacturers stopped making 2.5" SCSI hard drives I recall Apple laptops ending up using a regular 2.5" IDE HDD with a SCSI adaptor board! So much electronics! I found a solution to the lack of drives though - certain printers used a 2.5" SCSI hard drive as an internal buffer - so I bought as many of those kits as I could afford, I ended up using them all in Apple laptops!

They also made double hight/platter 1.8 inch hard drives for larger capacity IPod classic units which also significantly increased the thickness of the higher capacity original IPods! :)

Impressive Video....!!!!!!

making and designing theses probably harder than making a flash drive.

I got my hands on a "General UDisk", the device name as it appears on software, which is the size and form of a flash drive. Seeing this video, it is definitely not a real hard disk drive.

Wow i cant believe that there's an hard drive, a mechanical hard drive as "big" as SD card, i thought Apple iPod drive is already the smallest HDD i will ever seen since i take it apart from my original iPod out of curiosity. I never own iPod mini so i never knew that iPod using mechanical hard drive, back when people craze over iPod mini, people simply call it "Compact Flash" for it storage, while Compact Flash is common especially on digital camera back in early 2000's

It's interesting how the laws of physics allow some products to be scaled between such extremes.

Very good!

I love how the apple hdd has a gaint apple logo and you can clearly see "samsung" in the top left corner.

This was fascinating! I never knew how small those things got! You should have mentioned how LARGE the FIRST hard drive was! Look up the IBM Model 350.

Very intertaining, I remember harddrives 50x50x75 cm with whole 5 MB in 1973.

I didn't even know there was a smaller than 1.8" HDD 😮

At 15:00 "If I can ever get this interface working, Then I'll be making the worlds smallest mechanical, spinning hard disc usb memory stick" *No. No You won't.* That was done and made commercially available in 2008. The Swissbit Mini S.Valigetta was released in 2008. Had 8 GB storage. Was USB and had a mechanical hard drive in it much smaller than anything you've shown.

thanks to the algorithm i've seen something that i probally never seen one in my life

In all my years of building and repairing PC's I had no idea of what was in other devices and how small mechanical drivers had gotten.

This is evolution. Amazing. In this video I only miss the 5 1/4 hard disks as ST238R as consumer disks too. Bigger than that, only the mainframe HDs like the one seen on EEVblog #395

1:25 Sony's DCR - SR line of camcorders also uses this type of drive

O my god... Its good to see small hdd

People from those days would be absolutely astonished if they could’ve seen our 1TB micro sd cards, or our tiny NVME storage

apple and samsung work together all the time, so it’s not uncommon at all to see both brands on a part