This TINY Hard Drive is REAL... and it changed the world!

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This TINY Hard Drive is REAL... and it changed the world! - IBM Microdrive

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Күн бұрын

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They weren’t around for that long, but IBM’s microdrive had a major impact on multiple industries.
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CHAPTERS
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0:00 Intro
1:15 Back in the 1990s, Compact Flash was born...
2:30 ... But it was REALLY expensive and REALLY small.
3:02 Enter the Microdrive - Digital media suddenly got affordable
3:58 It's literally a tiny hard drive that holds thousands of photos
5:03 Way less expensive than flash and 4x bigger! But slow...
6:21 Competition heated up - Surely this was the future?
7:21 iPods and MP3 players got smaller thanks to Microdrive
8:45 And then flash caught up
9:50 Let's open one up and peek inside
12:29 Conclusion - The right tech at the right time

Пікірлер: 2 800

@DVSPress Жыл бұрын

I remember a friend having one of these for a camera and it had ONE GIGABYTE of storage. At the time, that felt like infinity for a digital camera.

@lth3may029 Жыл бұрын

I have a compact flash for my EOS Rebel XT... 2 GB

@guadalupe8589 Жыл бұрын

@@lth3may029 ok....

@biddinge8898 Жыл бұрын

I am going insane

@lth3may029 Жыл бұрын

@@guadalupe8589 sorry I was just sharing I wasn't trying to be rude

@Biaanca5036 Жыл бұрын

My CD Mavica still works. It's a modern one with silver casing and blue trim. It actually saves in .TIF files :)

@Ozymandias1 Жыл бұрын

1:37 PCMCIA was jokingly referred to as standing for People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms back in the 90s. 😂

@supralapsarian Жыл бұрын

Ha! That’s what I came to post. Just a month late, I guess. 🤣

@chowrites6179 Жыл бұрын

To be honest, I never wouldve guessed that sort of HDD was possible today, let alone over two decades ago! Absolutely impressive

@BrandtRedd Жыл бұрын

It may be less possible today than back then. As solid-state has replaced electro-mechanical, our ability to fabricate such tiny mechanical components has diminished.

@andrewbarentine2187 Жыл бұрын

@@BrandtRedd I wouldn’t say impossible, more improbable, We still have all the knowledge to make these, the problem is the machinery that made them probably dosnt exist anymore, right along with what you said

@littlejackalo5326 Жыл бұрын

@@BrandtRedd there's not any specialized fabrication in that assembly. We're far better at miniaturization today than 30-40 years ago. This would be far easier to create today. Maybe you could argue that we don't have tooling to create players that are 1" in diameter, but that's a non issue.

@kaitlyn__L Жыл бұрын

@@littlejackalo5326 it’s not about theoretical capacity but practical. Theoretically we could build a new factory for CRTs too. But without the capital to get it set back up, no one is doing it, and so the practical skills are also getting rusty. Go long enough without doing it, and just having the schematics isn’t actually sufficient anymore - as can be seen by people failing to build Victorian steam locomotives from the blueprints. The “techne” has been retained but the “metis” has been lost, to use the jargon from one particular philosophy of epistemology. Many militaries around the world have faced this issue too, they try to do maintenance/rebuild on some older gear and after even 10 years of no one doing it, there’s no one with the practical knowledge left in the organisation to actually do it properly. Even with all the documentation intact. We’re not quite at that stage yet for Microdrives, because larger hard drives are still being manufactured. And Brandt chose his words carefully, as he said “diminished”. But there would still need to be a decent chunk of change spent on R&D to get good at the specific application again, in addition to the capital costs of setting up the production line again. And until/if that ever happens, no one is producing tiny hard drives, so the institutional retained knowledge will continue to diminish.

@manitoba-op4jx Жыл бұрын

@@kaitlyn__L this is why we should continue using these things. i want to buy new tubes of many kinds (display, recieving tubes, indicators) and stuff like the microdrive, but noone is making it.

@cromulence Жыл бұрын

The other fun fact about Compact Flash is that it's ATA compatible, meaning that with a cheap passive adapter, you could plug it directly into an IDE socket on your laptop or PC. I recently took the 6GB drive out of my iPod mini and replaced it with a CF to SD adapter and a 256GB microSD card. The second gen mini will accept cards up to this size believe it or not!

@bobboukie Жыл бұрын

I used a compact flash drive as a SSD in the past to use as a boot drive for a linux firewall. on a super-old HP SFF 486 desktop, it was lightning fast compared to the crappy HDDs of the time.

@TechGorilla1987 Жыл бұрын

Several of the fuel dispenser that you see around you have full on motherboards including all of the normal IO running off Compact Flash. At the lease the Gilbarco Encores withing the last 10 years have.

@cp1011986 Жыл бұрын

I worked for a Japanese company at the time. I had to repair a laptop, and it took me a while to figure out this tiny thing was the storage.

@Nevir202 Жыл бұрын

With those low speeds, kinda surprised to hear that they found their way into laptops as primary storage. But I guess for something that was that era's version of a "Chromebook" this would have been completely acceptable, eh? No need for high read/write speeds for word processing and spreadsheets. I imagine that made boot times EVEN worse than usual for the era though lol.

@wrth Жыл бұрын

@@Nevir202 these days dirty cheap laptops brand new all have slow soldered EMMC storage. I'm guessing the hard drive was the old equivalent.

@firesurfer Жыл бұрын

@@Nevir202 Boot times were 3-5 minutes and I don't think people noticed.

@Alias_Anybody Жыл бұрын

@@wrth eMMC is bad, but not quite THAT bad. If the OS is optimized for it you at least still measure boot times in seconds and not minutes.

@NikolaguitarREZB Жыл бұрын

@wrth eMMC is fine for cheaper devices. Yes, sluggish, but dirt cheap and widely available. And it's not -that- bad. The base model of the steam deck uses eMMC and its doing its job adequately.

@SafetyOfficerRichards Жыл бұрын

Bring back Linus Cat Tips

@iqcq2063 Жыл бұрын

Yeah!

@hazer4 Жыл бұрын

Meow meow there is a Logitech mouse over there

@SyncronedStuff Жыл бұрын

I unironically support this

@eclipsemantis Жыл бұрын

Yes!

@bluekarnage1985 Жыл бұрын

Linus Cat Nips... Wait nvm.. I can just see a hairy linus nipple on my screen🤢 😂😂

@chrisco7 Жыл бұрын

The first digital camera I used was floppy based. To get the full 640 resolution you got 11 photos per disc. Had to carry a bunch to take the school formal photos.

@VeritasEtAequitas Жыл бұрын

Did you know you vuod reformat regular 1.44 MB floppies to be 1.72 MB for free? I remember doing that to squeeze more space out of them, lol

@richardsteiner8992 4 ай бұрын

A Mavica?

@smtoonentertainment Жыл бұрын

It's so unreal how far we've come in small form storage. I love it.

@TodayIFoundOut Жыл бұрын

"But none of them had the longevity or the cultural impact of the ipod." THIS ZUNE ERASURE WILL NOT STAND!!! 😋 -Daven

@Galiant2010 Жыл бұрын

Better get Fact Boy to do an episode about the cultural relevance of the Zune, then!

@0Sprey1 Жыл бұрын

Zune30 still going strong 💪🏻

@vamwolf Жыл бұрын

Zune hd 16 gb still kicking

@G_de_Coligny Жыл бұрын

Cultural impact is not hardware lifespan… But I’m sure you were at least joking…

@nodrogstacey7813 Жыл бұрын

Should we expect a TIFO sometime in the future where Simon extols the virtues and development of the Zune?

@hjf3022 Жыл бұрын

I remember the first time I realised my iPod had a spinning hard drive in it. When you started playing music, you could feel the gyroscopic effect of the platter spinning up. I'm amazed how well they dealt with being portable devices subject to acceleration and rotational forces, etc.

@connorbrown8479 Жыл бұрын

Considering i used to skateboard and snowboard with my ipod in my pocket, I'd have to agree

@squngy0 Жыл бұрын

Discman already had the same problem and the solutions are basically the same too.

@vadnegru Жыл бұрын

I'm still amazed how well 2.5" work on a laptops. They work fine on car or train, but when my friend were angry that his laptop lags, he just broke one by hitting it.

@Derpynewb Жыл бұрын

Flash memory is really useful. Hardrives take the same power whther its reading slow or fast, so you may as well shove everything as fast as you can into memory. Ipod gained a shit ton of battery life because of that, same with anything that reads spinning media. Like Discmans and MD walkmans.

@PrivateSi Жыл бұрын

I used them in my old mini PC shop for converting my smallest thin clients into stand-alones,20 years ago. They were cheaper per MB and more reliable than CF cards even though mechanical as a cheap CF card would often fail during it's first windows install,, and even better quality ones couldn't take more than a few installs (or say going from windows to linux and back to windows).. I learned this the expensive way. I bought 300 second hand microdrives once. about 1 in 20 were duff but I was expecting much worse, and never had any of the thin client conversions back. I was always amazed at how robust they were once installed.

@df1ned Жыл бұрын

Hard drives are one of those technologies that are amazing if you don't understand how they work, but become even more amazing once you do

@BartKost Жыл бұрын

What might also be interesting to note is that IBM contracted a watchmaker to make these (at least in the beginning) because the hard drive producing companies at the time had no experience making such tiny devices.

@ironhead2008 Жыл бұрын

Surprised he didn't mention that the CF/Microdrive interface is also pin compatible with the IDE standard, which is why CF cards are a go to for retro hardware nerds like myself. Fast, effective, and reliable for anything Windows 3.11 on back provided you go with the "industrial" or "heavy duty" versions but you lose the auditory aesthetic of true spinning rust.

@JeffDM Жыл бұрын

I was about to mention that. I have CF adapters for a computer with IDE ports and it works pretty well. There's no logic on the adapter, it's a plain PCB with connectors, a jumper, and an LED.

@ifur Жыл бұрын

I looked at the port and I went this looks like ide but smaller

@feinschmegga Жыл бұрын

I used a CF to IDE adapter back in the day to recycle an old laptop into a digital picture frame. The CF held just enough storage for the OS and pictures and allowed the picture frame to run without hard drive noises Edit" the video is still on KZfaq :-D kzfaq.info/get/bejne/grd2h5WLxqyzmn0.html

@PrivateSi Жыл бұрын

As a kid (un)fortunate enough to have a Sinclair QL as the home computer / dad's computer I grew up with Microdrive Cartridges before 3.5'' 'floppies' even existed and 360kb genuinely floppy 5.25'' disks were the norm.. Sinclair Microdrive Cartridges could hold about 110kb on a continuous loops of tape (so random access unlike an audio cassette).. -- IBM's microdrives may be 1000x better in every way but aren't REMOVABLE media, and Sinclair Microdrive user will tell you there is something special about the feel and sound of inserting a Sinclair Microdrive Cartridge into a Sinclair Microdrive.... The cartridges were about the same size as an IBM microdrive too, if not a bit smaller. -- Ironically, I had a mini PC business (mainly on ebay) for a while 20 years ago and used a microdrive as the main hard drive on many. They were actually more reliable, faster and cheaper than CF Flash for many years. Many writes quickly kill CF cards, even with no swap file. A microdrive could run a swap file and take as many OS installs as you like.. blah blah.. Microdrives!

@Pyroteq Жыл бұрын

It's not a truly retro experience if you don't have the hum and clicks of a giant 5.25" HDD spinning up.

@TheMx5Channel Жыл бұрын

I love these "older" video's about old tech. It's great to see how far we came in those years.

@batt3ryac1d Жыл бұрын

You say "older" but the early 2000's was like 20 years ago that shit IS OLDER 😅

@zefellowbud5970 Жыл бұрын

@@batt3ryac1d to be fair technology has changed alot ever since I personally miss the old wacky days of keypad phones, they got all sorts of shapes and sizes then. But i understand how that wouldn’t work for smartphones which need to follow standardized shapes to fit the apps they work with.

@narkit7849 Жыл бұрын

@@batt3ryac1d 23*

@erik3371 Жыл бұрын

It just makes me feel old when people didn't know about the stuff presented.... 😢😂

@TheMx5Channel Жыл бұрын

@@erik3371 haha I get that, to be fair i'm 28 myself but I grew up with a lot of old tech so i might be on the young side but i'm a chocked as you are when some people don't know what a cassette is.

@tomcat3266 Жыл бұрын

I remember a guy from IBM who came to our class for a lecture. He said that the hardware people were developing a hard disc the size of a quarter to put a large amount of data to it. It was up to us the software people to work hard and to figure out how to access these large amount of data from these advancing technologies. Lots of math in our software classes (maybe 80% was math).

@klepow Жыл бұрын

I remember, in the mid-'90s there was a small hard disk that was maybe the size of a PC card. It was meant for use in a Canon DSLR. Being a professional photo assistant at the time, I went to a workshop where we learned how to use all the new digital gear. It was 640 megs, I think. I think the cheapest pro digital camera outfit we saw that day was $10k US. Some of our employers could afford them, but we could never hope to. I very much miss the scanning backs for view cameras. They simply aren't available anymore.

@kaitlyn__L Жыл бұрын

That’ll be the full-size PC-card format, which was initially developed for storage and only later in development was also intended for peripherals :)

@klepow Жыл бұрын

@@kaitlyn__L it might have been, although PC cards were already used for other things. There were modems, ethernet, and a few others. This one actual took two PC card slots that cut away so that you could put it in. People usually didn't use laptops for digital imaging baxk then. The screens didn't give enough color accuracy, and they just weren't powerful enough.

@WitchMedusa Жыл бұрын

Let's take a moment to appreciate IBM for giving proper full sized gigabytes & not cheaping out. It's this little things like this which make you feel warm inside 😊

@aleks138 Жыл бұрын

*cough* samsung

@theantipope4354 Жыл бұрын

100%!

@Chris.Davies Жыл бұрын

It's just that IBM people were so techno-focused it simply would never occur to them.

@kaiwalpanchal5872 Жыл бұрын

@@Chris.Davies IBM guys listened techno?

@Affenbrot918 Жыл бұрын

Well depends on whats on the sticker GB (10^9 Bytes) or GiB (2^30 Bytes)

@flamingburritto Жыл бұрын

More these tech history videos would be ABSOLUTELY amazing!

@mikeperry6382 Жыл бұрын

yess!! Linus Tech History.. thats content i'd pay for

@jonatanrullman Жыл бұрын

Best thing about the iPod mini, apart from the pretty nice form factor, was that you could flash convert it with a CF card. I remember buying the very first 32gb CF card that was generally available and cramming it into a green mini. Had to import it special from China and it was made (or at least branded) by a basically unknown company called Adata.

@benjiderrick4590 Жыл бұрын

Adata is less of a knockoff brand than the usual AliExpress stuff. They make average quality hardware, like elpida or silicon power. Of course there is always a faster/better product, but it at least works well enough. I also have a 64gb iPod Mini, and while it works, it is the model that gave me the most issues with flash modding. Disk icon several times before deciding to boot, very low battery life even with brand new battery, it is tricky to get going, but I still like the form factor, it's perfect in the hand.

@jonatanrullman Жыл бұрын

@@benjiderrick4590 yes, they are now. But this was 15 years ago.

@ComradeMiladin Жыл бұрын

0:23 "Thousands, or even hundreds of files" -Linus 2k23

@kaigaming5165 Жыл бұрын

It's crazy how far we have come with tech.

@quake2u Жыл бұрын

And how fast.

@SilverKnightPCs Жыл бұрын

I'm so glad you are doing content on these older techs that changed the way things were done. Its important to know the history of it so we can learn from and appreciate the engineering that made everything we have today possible

@he8535 Жыл бұрын

11:58 did they blur the hard drive on the right?

@randomdestructn Жыл бұрын

@@he8535 Yeah. Maybe some employee was in the background who shouldn't have been on camera?

@Kyuubi840 Жыл бұрын

3:08 I hadn't seen that image icon in decades!

@pestmortum4869 Жыл бұрын

This is so crazy. Today you have up to 8TB m.2 SSD. Back in the days I had one of the first MP3 Players with 128 MB space. Some guys from my school asked me, where to put the CDs in :D In the last ~20 years so much happened. Cant wait to see what else will happen in the next 20 years.

@LizardVideoDude Жыл бұрын

I had an early Creative Nomad mp3 player. The model with no storage (add your own card) was $100. But the one with 64 MB flash was $300! 😳Wow, how times have changed.

@whyjnot420 Жыл бұрын

I remember when these came out and how impressed I was by them. Granted storage space these days is insane, but these are still pretty impressive bits of tech.

@s.i.m.c.a Жыл бұрын

aha...like 512 gb/ 1 tb mini-sd cards but with same poor performance due to overheating ;)

@whyjnot420 Жыл бұрын

@@s.i.m.c.a Nah. Nothing really moving inside those, not in the mechanical sense. Nothing really neat about them aside from their storage space alone. It is the miniaturization of the mechanical stuff that makes these things still pretty impressive. Also the fact that they were designed to be moved around in ways that regular mechanical hard drives are not. Which is something that does not really need to be accounted for with modern flash memory. Not in the way a spinning platter and moving head needs to. Much more akin to the stresses of a laptop hard drive. Also, keep in mind what other read, write and transfer speeds were prevalent in the 90s and 00s. So, not nearly as big of a hit in performance as similar numbers would be today. Still, it is a pretty valid comparison when thinking about how both work in the real world.

@helplmchoking Жыл бұрын

It's crazy to think how much work went into manufacturing so many unbelievably small parts to shrink a drive to that size just to get a couple GB or even a few hundred MB into a 1" space. Then you fast forward a decade or two and we have drives with 1000GB that are basically a millimetre thick plastic chip the size of a fingernail

@NonLegitNation2 Жыл бұрын

watch, in 10yrs we're gonna have Petabyte drives and we'll look back and laugh at our measly 4TB M.2 NVME drives.

@InfernosReaper Жыл бұрын

It's honestly kinda weird to me that these didn't improve in capacity and/or manufacturing efficiency over the years and just kinda died out. Then again, current metal platter tech has kinda stagnated a bit in terms of growth.

@ChrisComley Жыл бұрын

My first digital camera had a microdrive. Actually, the first one I got was faulty - if you held it near your ear you could just hear THAT clicking noise, the classic "hard disk trying to initialise" click of doom. Swapped out under warranty of course, and the next one lived until bigger storage became a thing. Probably still works, not fired it up in a couple of decades tho.

@DavidPaulMorgan Жыл бұрын

This has to be one of the cutest "disassemblings" I've seen.loved the contrast between the whispering tone when handling and describing each layer, then the whoops of enthusiasm when matching each part to its enormous brother!

@thecorruptedbit5585 Жыл бұрын

I love these retro-tech videos. The production value is incredibly high for these!

@bomb00000 Жыл бұрын

I have a hard drive USB that was a little less wide than a credit card, but yet still thin enough to fit in your palm. Me and brother wondered if other people ever had such a thing and to even see who made the damn thing! To this very day, the tiny hard drive is an absolute mystery to us

@alexstromberg7696 Жыл бұрын

Isnt that just a 2.5" hhd

@etch3130 Жыл бұрын

@@alexstromberg7696 Sounds more like an ipod drive.

@NFMorley Жыл бұрын

@@alexstromberg7696 No, I think I know what form factor he's talking about. There were 1.8 inch sized drives in the early-mid 2000s that were used in regular iPods and are also really slim (as they had larger capacity than these micro-HDDs or CF cards at the time). That's how Apple got 30gb into devices like iPod Video which was only 1cm deep, all the way back in 2005.

@sammoore2242 Жыл бұрын

@@NFMorley For context Microdrive is a 1" drive, and there are some rare toshiba 0.85" drives mostly used in early nokia smartphones.

@Pasi123 Жыл бұрын

@@NFMorley I have a 2008 HTC Shift X9500 with a 1.8" 120GB HDD and the original 40GB HDD. The 120GB is clearly thicker than the 40GB one so I guess it has two platters. They are cool but slow for Windows Vista/7

@chanahasnomana Жыл бұрын

Retro series are always cool. I love new stuff reviews, but older uncanny and bizarre oddware is so fun to look at. LGR does that so well too

@ollyshighlightreel6530 Жыл бұрын

I remember getting a USB version of the Microdrive as a college student! I saw one in the local Computer Hardware shop, thought it was pretty novel (I was 16 at the time...) and bought one. I used the college network for downloading things while in class (Because my home internet was painfully slow) and needed a compact way of getting that back home... These Microdrives were bigger than the USB Flash Drives (128MB was common at the time) and they worked! But, I ended up completely ruined it by not taking care of it. Fun times!

@miguelkuoertigo5288 Жыл бұрын

Man, that sad smiley face at 7:41 made me laugh, such a subtle way of expressing the death of Ipod series.

@shahidwani9504 Жыл бұрын

5:48 REMEMBER turn your computer off before midnight of 02/31/99😂😂😂 its on the display behind linus

@user__fs Күн бұрын

3:06 I have exactly the same 340 MB microdrive that I bought around the year 2000 to 2002. It is still working, and I keep it in my drawer. During that time, the largest flash storage media were 128 MB, such as 128 MB SmartMedia cards and 128MB Sony Memory Sticks. Colleagues around me were surprised when they saw the 340 MB microdrive. Everyone would say, 'Wow! You have such a large drive!‘

@pondum_ Жыл бұрын

I actually have a broken one somewhere in my room, my dad was an amateur photographer in the 90s to early 2000s. Makes a little rattle noise when it’s moved lol. I think it’s beyond saving but I wish I could.

@SteebMo Жыл бұрын

This was so cool. It aligns perfectly with the rise of digital photography. I remember paying $110 for a 1GB CF card. Honestly even today, my 32GB CF card is impressively fast for how old the standard for it is.

@claudiovenanzi4610 Жыл бұрын

I still have the 8MB CF card of my 1MP camera from 2000, crazy how things changed the last twenty years.

@erwindegroot8760 Жыл бұрын

My 4MP Konica-Minolta came with a 16mb card, times have indeed changed.

@petersziraki7672 Жыл бұрын

I really like these vintage tech videos, please keep them coming! :)

@smalltime0 Жыл бұрын

My school had a few floating around the photography department. The teacher in charge actually convinced the principal at the time to buy a bunch of flash cards (because students+moving drives don't mix), but the cameras they bought came with them anyway. By the time I got there, they were sort of irrelevant, but why throw out something if it can be used? Trusted students were allowed to borrow equipment over term breaks or the weekend etc. and usually they got given the microdrives rather than the flash drives.

@madsmith1352 Жыл бұрын

Thank you for some of these recent videos that cover tech history. I think these are invaluable at preserving context that the younger generation won’t have experienced.

@JaviSoto Жыл бұрын

More of this, please. I grew up in the 90s and didn't know so much about this. And thoroughly enjoyed seeing just how far we've come in half a lifetime. Do GPUs next? 😄

@huhridge260 Жыл бұрын

You should check out LGR and Techmoan, if you're interested in old tech!

@TheRealLink Жыл бұрын

Remember having a Voodoo FX for a bit in college, it was the bomb! But yeah retro GPUs are amazing too.

@nobody8717 Жыл бұрын

my first usb flash drive was $120 and held 1GB. And it still works 18 years later.

@acorredorv Жыл бұрын

I still have my first usb flash drive, a 1GB Verbatim. It was very expensive, but I wanted to be able to store a CD image in it! Back in the day it was mindblowing... A few years later they were giving them away for free, I have a Coca Cola branded one.

@Setsuna_Kyoura Жыл бұрын

Wow 1Gig in 2005? That must have been fucking expensive. I still have an 256MB Apacer Steno from that time and it already cost over 100 bucks back then...

@hellterminator Жыл бұрын

@@Setsuna_Kyoura My first drive was a 2GB A-Data and it died in a few years. Then I got a 4GB OCZ which used a dual channel flash controller to achieve higher speeds. It actually maxed out USB 2. It was very expensive for the time. About $200, which could have bought a 16GB drive. But this drive, I could full read/write in 5 minutes vs. the several hours it would take to actually transfer 16GB on the cheaper drive. And after a million drops and even a few washing machine cycles, it still works today. And - in terms of speed, at least - it's actually still very competitive with modern commodity drives.

@VauxhallViva1975 Жыл бұрын

Storage capacity-vs-cost has continued to plummet. I just bought a 512GB M.2 SSD for sixty bucks new..... My first flash drive cost $250 and had a capacity of 256MB. It was the top-of-the-line drive of the time though, brushed aluminum case and supported a full USB1 write speed. ;)

@acorredorv Жыл бұрын

@@Setsuna_Kyoura it was stupid expensive, I can't recall exactly what the exchange rate was, but I must have paid close to $200 USD. It was so stupid expensive that for most stuff I used smaller 64/128mb sticks to avoid wear on the 1GB one... I didn't get to use it that much before they were giving away 1GB sticks for free...

@sireuchre Жыл бұрын

One of the reasons flash memory media dropped so quickly in price in the early 2000s was not just 'the technology maturing', but because like DRAM chips, NAND chips were subject to price fixing shenanigans, but when the DRAM scandal came to light, the NAND market gave up its pricing hijinks as well, considering most companies making one also made the other. RAM and flash media dropped in price at a staggering rate in that time, and it didn't really bottom out until the early 2010s.

@TheJohn8765 Жыл бұрын

Wow. That was really interesting. I knew ipods had an HD but assumed they were just ... I guess I didn't give it much thought. Miniaturizing all the components must have been a pretty tricky engineering problem, esp when they had to assume drops and bumpy use over the expected lifespan. Cool!

@somenygaard Жыл бұрын

I loved my 3.5 disk camera. My family had a couple. Not too bad at the time and was very easy to send pictures to family without plugging in the camera or needing some card adapter.

@markasiala6355 Жыл бұрын

Same here. If I was out taking pictures, I didn't need a laptop to get clear out storage before taking more pictures. At that time you could buy floppies for so cheap you could just pick up another box to have in reserve. I frequently had the leg up on my brother who had a CF camera at the same time.

@fueledbythefireofficial Жыл бұрын

3:41 I love how they have to specify that "lower is better" on the Dollars per Megabyte chart lol

@davidfarrell1062 Жыл бұрын

I remember having one of these 340mb ones that came with a cannon camera. Had totally forgotten about them...

@MahouSai Жыл бұрын

( 10:58 ) Linus: it's even smaller and cuter than I thought ... No, that's what she said. I'm sorry, Linus. :(

@mattbosley3531 Жыл бұрын

I had one of those old Sony digital cameras that used floppies for picture storage. It may not be great compared to today, but back then it was terrific.

@c0smicc4nc3r4 Жыл бұрын

2:06 that made me laugh idk why

@chrispitchforth621 Жыл бұрын

I honestly think you need to start a museum of tech. Archive all of your successes and failures as well.

@sirlesliechao Жыл бұрын

My friend has a camera that recorded on LS120. That was pretty dope! It's crazy how quickly, and far NAND has progressed after becoming a viable alternative to micro HDD.

@manualdidact Жыл бұрын

Pre-ordered the 1GB model when it was announced, for my Canon Powershot camera. All I could tell about it was that it was slightly faster than the flash cards I was comparing it to, and the capacity was vast at the time. And I loved that little whir sound after taking a picture, though you had to have the camera close to your ear to hear it.

@Jehty_ Жыл бұрын

When you say "faster" in this context does that mean that you had to wait after each picture some time before you could take the next one? Do you roughly know how long that was?

@manualdidact Жыл бұрын

@@Jehty_ I believe there was a very brief delay while the camera wrote to the card, but not really that noticeable. I was mainly referring to bulk operations, like when using the microdrive or CF card with a laptop via the PCMCIA slot, moving a lot of images, etc. For just taking single images, it seemed like it was writing the entire image to cache; you weren't stuck waiting while the disk was still spinning. (My recall is pretty fuzzy; it's been a long time.)

@Jehty_ Жыл бұрын

@@manualdidact 🤣 now I feel like an idiot. Somehow I didn't think about moving the pictures. Thanks :)

@dmmartindale Жыл бұрын

It is worth noting that there were two different thicknesses of CF cards, 3.3 mm "Type 1" and 5 mm "Type II". The Microdrive was a Type II (thicker) card, and not all cameras would accept it in their card slot. I remember that the first digital camera I bought, the Canon G2, was one that did support both thicknesses of CF card. The G2 could be set to output raw-format images instead of JPEGs, and with raw image files being about 50% larger than the highest-quality JPEGs, the extra storage space was important.

@SlightlyNasty Жыл бұрын

I used to have one of those little square Creative MP3 players, and hearing (and feeling!) that little microdrive seeking was always a surreal experience - just knowing that there was a tiny, fully functional hard drive squeezed in there somewhere.

@dragon2knight Жыл бұрын

Microdrives kicked ass! I even held onto my old ones for years, they were pretty tough.

@theangryintern Жыл бұрын

12:51 I loved the Creative Nomad Jukebox! That thing was fantastic when I was on the ship in the Navy, I didn't need my huge CD binders to hold all the discs. I think it had a 6GB drive in it, which given the low bit-rates we could rip MP3s at the time, it could hold a TON of music.

@xxx_ray Жыл бұрын

Was my favorite PMP!

@BlackDoveNYC Жыл бұрын

I had one too.

@f1reb4ll77 Жыл бұрын

Nokia N91 had a mechanical 0.85" 4GB HDD inside, I think it was the tiniest one ever made.

@BriBCG Жыл бұрын

Was so fascinated by those things when they came out.. Amazing to me how they made it so small.

@JohnneyleeRollins Жыл бұрын

I’m very impressed on the turnaround time for this to be made since Linus mentioned it 😮

@Metal_Maxine Ай бұрын

My dad was an "IBM Partner" when these were launched and they were handing out little Microdrive sized chocolate mints wrapped to look like little Microdrives.

@krisb853 Жыл бұрын

I love the informative videos. I would love a video about “computers before you were born” and talk about the major computer moments before 2005 ish.

@ffwast Жыл бұрын

I remember my mother upgrading from a Polaroid camera to a floppy disk camera for work back in 1999,I found it in the attic last year and I think the picture resolution was 640x480

@Nick-ds6oc Жыл бұрын

Honestly, I was expecting it to be way more potato than that. Neat!

@dh2032 Жыл бұрын

@@Nick-ds6oc when there where a think anytthing have floppy dive, last one I saw it using hd disk, the 720 where still a thing back then, (don't no, but would get, if could use 720 fat) formatted floppy, almost any machine with floppy 3.5 drive could read the floppy images, of the disk, even more convenient, flapping SD-cards today

@ffwast Жыл бұрын

@@Nick-ds6oc There was a higher resolution model but she didn't want to spend the money for it

@sahajsarup Жыл бұрын

CF cards are technically IDE ATA (technically PATA), which is an extension of the upper bits of 16bit ISA and it remotely follows the MFM harddrive protocols from the AT PS2 era. PCMCIA just used the same standard. You can passively convert CF cards to IDE without requiring any controller and it works fine on older machines.

@BastetFurry Жыл бұрын

Tiny correction, these are actual IDE drives, the PCMCIA standard just happens to support the PCMCIA controller being run as an IDE controller. The first PC Card standard was just more or less an ISA bus fed trough these tiny pins and was mostly used for memory cards, check out the Tidalwave PS-1000 Palmtop, that uses RAM cards, which still cost an arm and three legs thanks to being used in industrial machines, as its storage media. And the Amiga 1200 and 600, which both have PCMCIA slots, can use RAM cards as a memory upgrade. Later they added a PCI mode to the standard and then it more or less vanished in favor of just using USB dongles. By the way, in case anyone from LTT reads this, i would love an episode on old Palmtops like said Tidalwave. That one was sold to a million OEMs under different names, a popular version here in Germany came from Vobis and had the name Highscreen Handy Organizer. It is essentially a pocket IBM compatible, it has a NEC V30 and CGA monochrome graphics and is for all intents and purposes a Turbo XT class machine. And yes, it comes with and runs good old QBASIC. 😁

@gimmickmusic8827 Жыл бұрын

I love these semi-deep dives into old tech from when I was a wee lad.

@pheapkim978 Жыл бұрын

I love the fact that I seen all these tech changes growing up really makes me appreciate the read and write speeds we have now

@mouthwash884 Жыл бұрын

Now we have to choose between ~3,500 MBps or ~7,000 MBps. I’m building a new mini ITX setup for my living room, and trying to convince my wife to go with gen 4 PCIe is difficult…

@therogueadmiral Жыл бұрын

@@mouthwash884 Gen5 coming... eventually.

@legion3206 Жыл бұрын

It's mildly irratating for me if someone complains about a 5gb update and say it is super slow. Back when adsl arrived in my country we could only use 5GB per month.

@Wannes_ Жыл бұрын

now we're complaining about Apple skimping on SSD controllers on base M2 Macs so they only get sub 2 GB/s read/write speeds 🐌

@somecallmesean_ Жыл бұрын

7:55 na-no

@robotko_ruslan Жыл бұрын

Hello, fellow DankPods engoyer

@LinkWulluf Жыл бұрын

My first graphic design and digital communication class was done on cameras. The photography teachers themselves vocally spoke out against digital cameras.

@eruno_ Жыл бұрын

what's wrong with digital? do non digital cameras even exist nowadays?

@busterscrugs Жыл бұрын

I wonder how large capacity a modern microdrive could hit considering how far HDD density has come!

@carlosdgutierrez6570 28 күн бұрын

Probably could get near half a terabyte or even a terabyte.

@mitchellgr33n4 Жыл бұрын

I’ve been unironically been carrying around a Sony Mavica fd-91 since 2019 to take photos with a vintage look. There’s something so charming about loading colorful floppies into it in front of a bunch of strangers. Keeping up with the Joneses is why we live in a throwaway world when everything constantly changes

@Elmojomo Жыл бұрын

I still have my Mavica somewhere, too. I need to dig it out and see if it still works. I loved that camera, and took some pretty great photos with it.

@speedyink Жыл бұрын

I always loved these. Pretty cool to see one get opened up, mine still function and I wouldn't dare open one. It's so cute!

@BadMax02_VR 8 ай бұрын

i still remember the video in which linus rediscovers the Microdrive by accident. He got super excited and said that they should do a video about them and now here we are :D

@mikeallensonntag Жыл бұрын

That tiny cf hard drive is really a engineering marvel. Fact that people of earth built that small spinning storage back then is amazing.

@TomatoFettuccini Жыл бұрын

I remember those 1" micro drives. They were great and led to the 1.8" drives that powered the iPod years later.

@FlyboyHelosim Жыл бұрын

I have a laptop with one of those 1.8" iPod hard drives.

@fritzlb Жыл бұрын

I think the 1.8“ drives were earlier but with the 5th gen of iPods they managed to shrink them further

@KiinaSu Жыл бұрын

The 1.8" drives are amazing if you think about it. The 40GB iPod Classic came out 20 years ago. And yet now you can still get like 32-64GB Phones. The 160 GB iPod came out 15 years ago. The current iPhone and Galaxy still have a 128 GB Model for 800 bucks. If you told someone 15 years ago that their iPhone in 15 years might have less storage than their iPod now, I don't think they would've believed it. Sure the storage got smaller and faster and you can get 512gb options for a lot more money but the fact that the base models are still in that region is kinda weird.

@nazhif1 Жыл бұрын

No the only iPod to use 1" microdrive was the iPod Mini. All other iPods use 1.8 Drives. 1st - 4th gen uses ZIF connectors and later models use micro sata

@ijulesy Жыл бұрын

Love these videos looking back at retro tech! Keep em' coming :)

@TheBLC94 Жыл бұрын

Had one of these in a Nintendo DS media player back in the day, didn't appreciate how novel they were at the time!

@springheeledjacques Жыл бұрын

11:49 "don't talk to me or my son ever again"

@derranthefunnyguy Жыл бұрын

As sure as I am that videos about new and expensive tech are more fun to make and likely make more money I really enjoy this type of retrospective look at hardware that take you through the advancements that certain technology has made over the years, makes you appreciate what we have now just that little bit more.

@Farzlepot Жыл бұрын

I had a Creative Zen Micro with a microdrive! The thing was incredible at the time.

@Flymochairman1 Жыл бұрын

Somewhere around me here, is a SparQ Drive, which was usually seen with 300/400MB HDD cassettes. The one I have has a removable 1GB HDD Cassette with the cutest little platter! It was configured for W95/98 which was, back then, using internal HDD's with 300/400MB capacity. The guy who gave me it(wasn't it always thus...!) said that the SparQ Drive could hold all he had on his PC of the time. It was read to through the printer port and sat between PC and Printer...but I don't have the funky power cable or the Comm connectors and cables...(over-enthusiastic clear up) Nice one Linus and the team! Cheers!

@versluyssander Жыл бұрын

One of your best videos in a long time! More nostalgia tech dissections please :)

@user-qp8jk5dj2e Жыл бұрын

nokia n91 has this drive

@NigelMelanisticSmith Жыл бұрын

I bought a Sony Mavica around December, and it's been really interesting to work with, strategizing how to fit images on Floppies has a fun novelty in the modern age

@jasondrummond9451 Жыл бұрын

That was very interesting. Be nice to see more of these 'old tech' videos.

@redmonika9187 Жыл бұрын

I wanna encase it in resin with the platter exposed and make a pendant or something out of it or something. Its so cute

@Jernaumg Жыл бұрын

A Seagate drive that still spins after this long is the most amazing thing here. Heck a Seagate that still does anything after a week is a miracle.

@Spo8 Жыл бұрын

It was so cool back in the day to feel my iPod's hard drive spin up inside it. Solid state memory is hands down better, but man, there was a charm to that.

@MikeAn. Жыл бұрын

c'mon.. it's not THAT tiny.. i'd say it's average sized :/

@LunarKiwi Жыл бұрын

Just a fun fact, air bus a320 and 321s still use pcmcia cards to store flight data and every 10 days gets swapped out for a fresh one while the old info is dumped for data collection then wiped clean to be used again

@tsbrownie Жыл бұрын

I had one of these a professional photographer friend gave it to me. He tried to use these, and they were a fail. They couldn't tolerate even the lightest bumps or jostles, like cameras often get. They also were power hungry. They were bigger than other memory at the time, but only a bit and that advantage was short lived.

@Fieryaleeco Жыл бұрын

Chances are you have already done it, but if not, I’d love a deep dive on how USB replaced older systems like serial.

@sirspamalot4014 Жыл бұрын

USB didn't replace serial, it is serial. Universal Serial Bus. It unified the standard

@YaFunklord Жыл бұрын

People still use serial, and it is easy to plug in the correct way on the first try.

@jameslmathieson Жыл бұрын

I had one of those floppy disk cameras as a kid. It was dope.

@volvo09 Жыл бұрын

I've got one in my collection. It's a fun way to play around with older computers. My grandmother had one as a kid and I thought it was so cool.

@pixelpuppy Жыл бұрын

imagine if IBM pivoted near the end of the micro drive's life and took on the 2.5" laptop drives market, and portable hard drive market.

@fitybux4664 Жыл бұрын

0:05 "Did you know that there were cameras that used floppy disks for storage?"

@Felttipfuzzywuzzyflyguy Жыл бұрын

I love videos like this. Interesting tech that, in hindsight, were just stop gaps to where we ended up today. It's crazy to think how far we've come in such a short period of time. As an example, 5 cents per MB to 10 cents per GB and beyond for flash... Absolutely wild.

@Neoxon619 Жыл бұрын

To think that we used to load games off of such slow storage devices. Obviously SSDs have gotten really good lately, but still.

@SomeRandomPiggo Жыл бұрын

Games were much smaller in size back then so it wouldn't be too bad

@RCmaniac667 Жыл бұрын

Level loading speed significantly improved, but game performance overall stayed the same besides some stutter in low number of games

@bencze465 Жыл бұрын

what do you mean, i started off with magnetic tapes on zx80, and i dont consider myself old

@gravitone Жыл бұрын

except... you know... we didn't.....

@Mr.Marbles Жыл бұрын

the thing is you didnt really know, since all the loading times just were like this. but play some old games on an old pc and it will just drive you nuts, i guarantee it :D

@EtherImperial Жыл бұрын

I actually was only vaguely aware of the micro drive. I was fully expecting some talk of the 1.5 mini drive that I had encountered in some laptops so this was pretty cool. Especially the take apart

@CorgiButtOnWheels Жыл бұрын

I had an RCA H100A MP3 player back in the day as a hand-me-down from my mom. I took it apart one day (Can't recall why...) and I was pleasantly surprised to find one of those microdrives! Neat little deep dive into the history of these forgotten bits of storage mediums.

@iamthemusicman13 Жыл бұрын

i remember my dad and i were into photography but i was actually more into computers.. him and i realized this exact thing and i took one apart myself as well years back. crazy stuff