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By Richard Menta- 12/19/01 The first time I held one of IBM's Microdrives was when I reviewed the i2Go Ego back in June of 2000 (that portable could hold two Microdrives simultaneously). It was the 340MB drive and I was very impressed with its diminutive size. Halfway through that review IBM announced the 1GB Microdrive and I made it a point to review that unit too. It took me a year-and-a-half to get my hands on one, but that's OK because now is the time where its impact can be felt the most. |
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What makes the Microdrive so important is that it presently solves a big dilemma faced by informed buyers of digital music portables. Should they go for a small, flash memory based player with a modest 64MB capacity, or instead go with a much larger jukebox player like the Nomad Jukebox that have 100 times the capacity? Jukebox players can hold over 1,000 tunes, but the cost comes in their relatively hefty dimensions and weight.
The 1GB Microdrive offers plenty of capacity with the size and weight advantages of a flash memory card. It offers the best of both worlds as it serves that balance between capacity and size. It does it so well that it has a great competitive advantage over other storage media, one that can allow it to take over the digital music arena if leveraged correctly. There is just one issue IBM has to address very aggressively to achieve this - price.
Again, we are talking about the 1GB drive here. The 340MB may have already lost its opportunity.
Microdrive
The Microdrive drive is the same size as a CompactFlash (CF) memory card, designed specifically to fit in a CF slot. A year-and-a-half later, as I hold it in my hand, it still impresses me. It weighs only 16 grams (about half an ounce) yet can hold around 250 MP3 tunes at the standard 128kbit compression. In comparison, Creative's Nomad Jukebox weighs in at 0.9 pounds (397 grams). The 6GB and 20GB laptop drive it uses holds much more memory, but they are also what give the Nomad its girth.
I am testing the 1 GB Microdrive on e.Digital's fine MXP 100. At 139 grams (4.9 ounces) that portable is not even one of the lighter MP3 players, but its a size and weight is akin to the average flash-based portable. I can pop the unit in my pocket and go.
My experience was identical to that of a flash memory portable, but with one very noticeable difference. When I listen to a 64MB unit I am always waiting for the inevitable moment when the tunes run out. With only about 15 songs stored at any given time, that moment always comes too quickly.
I noticed that feeling still hung over me as the MXP 100 played song after song on the 1GB Microdrive. It must be from testing all those flash players, I am just trained to expect the music to stop after I listen to a dozen or so files. It never did. With 200 plus songs on the Microdrive I finished my session long before I ran through all the music.
The 1 GB Microdrive succeeds here in exceeding the listening expectations of a seasoned user of a digital music portable. It transcends the limitations of the flash memory card without forcing me to carry a brick for a portable music device. The satisfaction that comes with this is a customer experience that is most valuable in the MP3 player market today.
Bottom line, it was a liberating feeling. The Microdrive quietly did its job, barely even a whirr, and I loved having it in my player.
Power Consumption
In our first experience with the 340MB Microdrive last year, we discovered that the drives could be quite power hungry. A fresh set of Duracel Ultra's were killed in about an hour as we found that the Microdrive required regular batteries to be in the full state to give it the static push it needed (half-full batteries didn't work). Rechargeable batteries are a necessity, preferably a good set of lithium batteries.
| IBM improved on power consumption when it released the 1GB Microdrive. Beth Ellerman of IBM's Public Relations department described it nicely, "Higher-capacity Microdrives consume less power than their lower-capacity counterparts. It's a little bit counterintuitive, but the reasoning behind it is this: the 340 gigabyte model was the first to be announced, and consumers complained that it required too much power. So as each higher-capacity model was introduced, developers ensured they used less power than their predecessor. They did this by lowering the RPM: the lower the RPM, the less power required to function". |  |
The1GB drive lasted several hours in the e.Digital MXP 100 thanks to that units lithium batteries. Even though it may use less juice than the 340MB drive, rechargeable batteries are still needed. When searching through song files we noticed no discernible lag that might be caused by the slower RPMs of the 1GB Microdrive that runs at 3600 RPM, down from the 4500 RPM of the original 340MB drive.
Noise and Vibration
I barely heard or felt the drive when it was in action. Its presence was less noticeable than when I used the original 340MB Microdrive last year. This is probably a reflection of the slower RMPs, but the e.Digital player itself may have also offered an added dampening effect when compared to the i2Go.
Pixie Dust
| Last summer IBM announced its latest breakthrough on hard drive storage they call "pixie dust". Formally called antiferromagnetically-coupled (AFC) media, AFC media is expected to increase current area density limits by four-fold. AFC does this by employing multiple magnetic layers that act in opposite directions, but stick together through a thin layer of metal. |  |
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One article we came across on this technology said it will bring a 6GB Microdrive by early 2003. We asked IBM if indeed a 6GB drive was in the works for 2003, but they would neither confirm nor deny it.
Competition
We talk so much about price and potential here because the Microdrive does not exist in a competitive void. There are a number of worthy choices for storage media, several in the flash memory card arena alone, all fighting to see which will survive as a standard a few years from now. This includes the Smart Media Card, CompactFlash (CF), Multimedia Card (MMC), Sony's MagicGate Memory Stick, Iomega's PocketZip, Dataplay's removable drive, and 3-D Memory chips from Matrix Semiconductor that are promising 64 MB write-once cards for $3-10.
Only the Microdrive presently offers 1GB of storage, which is why it stands out from the crowd. That won't last long, though. SanDisk and Toshiba are already promising 1GB and 2GB flash cards by late next summer. They will be expensive at first, but they will also close the storage gap and possibly even surpass it. Consumers want more memory for their small players and everyone in the storage game is looking to provide it.
As for jukebox players, they are already getting smaller. Case in point is Apples recently released iPod. At 185 grams it weighs less than half that of the Nomad Jukebox and not that much more than the MXP 100. Its dimensions are smaller than the Nomad too. For those who have already seen the iPod commercial on TV, it clearly fits into a shirt pocket.
All this is to point out that competitive advantage is closely attached to time. It means more than just getting your product out first, it means compelling mass adoption of it in the marketplace while you have the technical lead.
Reliability
Our Microdrive worked fine, no problems. In our research, though, we did find that the original incarnation of the 340MB Microdrive was trouble-prone. Rob Galbraith's June 23 2000 story DigiNews Report: Readers weigh in on IBM microdrive reliability goes into detail on this. Since the present version of the Microdrive has significant improvements made to it, we probably can assume that the reliability bugs have been worked out on these drives. Still, we feel we should make our readers aware of this past problem so when they do their own research for purchase they can make as fully informed a decision as possible.
Conclusion
We are eventually going to see small gigabyte digital music portables at affordable prices. The question is do we have to wait a few years when we can have it now? That's up to IBM.
Companies like IBM traditionally employ a strategy of premium pricing when selling their most compelling innovations. At the time of this writing, the retail price for the 1GB drive is about $360, more than most MP3 players including the 6GB versions of the Nomad Jukebox and Archos Jukebox. (The 512MB Microdrive runs $260, the 340MB runs a little over $200).
Let's play a game. What if after Jan 1st IBM dropped the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) cost of the 1GB Microdrive to a point that would allow MP3 manufacturers to sell a basic 1GB portable for $250?
The answer is Microdrive players would take over a sizable percentage of the market. A large adoption by manufacturers would also propel the CF slot format over the others, ending for some the decision of which flash media to commit to. That's a lot of market influence, one that remains dormant if IBM is conservative with its price cuts. The Microdrive is not brand spanking new technology, it has been available a couple of years now and it's time to cut costs and mass produce them.
This is all coming from a consumer's point of view, we want more affordable high capacity memory and we want it now. It doesn't mean we are going to get it, but if we do we will buy and buy in volume. Flash cards haven't reached the 1GB plateau yet, but they will. Why spend on a power hungry Microdrive when flash memory cards are the same price and more convenient. If IBM doesn't do it now, then they will lose their competitive advantage as flash memory is allowed to catch up.
That is what has happen to the smaller incarnations of IBM's drive. A 256MB CF card sells on Amazon for $130 as of this writing. Two cards equal the capacity and price of the 512MB Microdrive, no advantage here for IBM.
The 1GB drive is another matter.
All this is not to criticize IBM's business decisions, I am sure they have a healthy R&D cost to recapture on their product. It is just to let them know they have a product that can do something for an impatient digital music audience today. If they serve our need, they win with market share. If consumers have to wait, we will use that time to explore other choices. Sony employed premium pricing on its Betamax line of video recorders that invented the home video market. In the end, they lost it all to the cheaper VHS format as consumers chose another option.
The 1GB Microdrive can dominate the market now, that's how good it is. If 1GB drives aren't a dominant niche in the MP3 market next Christmas, IBM can only blame itself for a lost opportunity. As for the consumer, we will just have to wait a little longer for that tiny MP3 player with lots of memory.
Below are the technical specifications of the Microdrive.
(1) 68 KB used for microcode (2) The term "Non-Operating" refers to the storage temperature
of a microdrive. For example, sitting in the trunk of the car on a cold
Minnesota morning or warmed by the rays of the Caribbean sun. The drive
will begin to run once the temperature has risen to the operating specification
value. |
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