A few weeks ago I decided to hop onto eBay and buy a couple microdrives for fun. If you haven’t heard of the term, a microdrive is a hard disk drive that fits into a CompactFlash slot. These were intended to be the future in mobile storage, with 20 GB drives being the biggest around 2006. Of course, these drives proved to be very delicate, and besides, now we get 128 GB microSD cards!
The drives I purchased appeared to be pulled from some old iPod minis. The seller tried to remove the Apple logo with some sort of solvent, but left the smudges behind.
-
- Seagate ST1 4 GB
-
- ST1 back labeling – note the smudged-out Apple logo on the left of the card
-
- The Hitachi 4 GB Microdrive
-
- Microdrive back labeling – note the smudged-out Apple logo on the top right… all that’s left is the (R) symbol
The problem with the iPod mini drives is that their CompactFlash interface is disabled. That is, the drive is really just a PATA drive in a CompactFlash’s body. Few devices that aren’t PCs support CompactFlash cards in this mode.
-
- Seagate ST1 in Sony Clie
Being the curious type, I popped the drives into my Sony Clie NX73V, which I still carry with me even though it’s 11 years old 🙂 . It has support for CompactFlash Type I and II (thin and thick, basically), and, according to the properties window in the OS, uses the ATA protocol to talk to the cards. This means it should interface with the cards just fine… right?
-
- … nope! No dice with the ST1.
-
- It enumerates at least…
-
- … ish.
First, I popped the Hitachi Microdrive in my Clie. One second after inserting the card, I see a question mark in the memory card’s taskbar icon. No dice.
Then, I moved on to the Seagate ST1. It spun up, but the Clie hung for about 30 seconds before finally displaying “The card cannot be recognized”. However, it did at least enumerate with the OS and I could pull up the manufacturer and model number of the drive.
Hm, well those ideas were dashed pretty quickly. Later, I bought a CompactFlash-to-PATA adapter, and a PATA-to-SATA adapter so I could hook it up to my laptop. From there, I used Hard Disk Sentinel (great software, by the way!) to analyze the drives and see if they have S.M.A.R.T. health reporting…
-
- Screenshot of Hitachi Microdrive
-
- S.M.A.R.T. data for Microdrive – note that Reallocated Sectors Count has a red X on it…
-
- HDS screenshot of Seagate ST1
-
- S.M.A.R.T. attributes for ST1 – note Seek Error Rate has a red X on it…
… and they do, alright! In fact, the drives I purchased were both soon to be dead. The Seagate drive had hundreds of bad sectors and a failing disk head/head actuator. The Hitachi drives had so many reallocated sectors that the drive literally ran out of spares. Too bad the Microdrive didn’t report how many sectors were reallocated though…
The drives themselves were in really bad shape, as seen below:
-
- Microdrive’s surface scan. Red blocks here mean that the disk had no spare sectors to replace them. Dark green means that the access time was rrrreeeealllllyyyy sloooooow…
-
- ST1’s surface scan. Yellow blocks indicate bad sectors were reallocated.
In the next part, I’ll show the aftermath of both drives. (Content Advisory: electronics gore)
Rip It Apart - Jason's electronics blog-thingy 