Crazy big

"The increased data capacity is due to its five-layer coating of "Pixie Dust" which is a three-atom-thick layer of precious metal sandwiched inbetween three magnetic layers."

THREE FREAKIN ATOMS!

I seem to remember a discussion of this stuff a long while back, but I couldn't find it. Anyway know where it is?

There is the old IBM article about pixie dust, and their white papers.

I hope the merger of IBM and Hitachi will not slow the production of the 80GB drives. If anyone spots them on sale, please post or send me a PM. I am really starting to run out of space with my last music / audio order. (getting into old time radio programs...)

Very cool. For digital cameras, though, I think the right answer is these new solid state 1GB CF cards. I just had a trip-and-drop-my-camera incident that completely killed my Microdrive (it makes really awful sounds when you try to read from it). Luckily, this happened in the morning just after I'd downloaded everything to my laptop. The camera itself fared somewhat better, but the drop managed to break two tiny plastic switches that the camera uses to detect that the battery is loaded and that the CF door is closed. Break those switches and the camera refuses to turn itself on.

It's now off to Canon for repairs. Hopefully they won't charge me an arm and a leg to fix it.

I also heard microdrives are battery hogs?

I had a 1GB that I used in my Nikon Coolpix 4500. It did use a little more battery power than a compact flash card, but not too much. I had to get rid of it though for the lag time on startup, and the speed at which images were saved to it.
Way too slow man...
Couldve just been the coolpix. might work better in other digital cameras. I traded it in for 2 512 CF cards.

Z~

Battery life was never a big problem for me (the camera could always go for a whole day, then recharge at night). Latency was enough of a problem, combined with my newly-discovered fragility issue. Now that flash memory is big enough, I'll argue that cameras don't really need Microdrives any more.

Microdrive scares me for the reason you discovered.

now you just need to add it into one of these
Not the Lexus Key apparently comes with it. I hope the car does too.

Unless I can store a large public/private key pair on it to authenticate to the car I don't want one

FireWire KeyChain is the industry's smallest portable, self-powered firewire storage device. It was designed and built based on customer input at the Macworld Expo show in early January. Many of its features will make it more appealing than current portable USB storage devices.

Except the fact that I have to also carry around a firewire cable with me at all times to use this device. Every USB keychain device I have seen can simply plug into a USB port with no necessary cable. Thats the bigest flaw I saw, and can't believe they haven't fixed it yet.