Ben Horne
Offline
• • • • • •
Upload & Sell: Off
|
John Thawley wrote:
Sorry if I'm jumping in late... but I have yet to hear a compelling argument for using microdrives. I have heard several frightening reasons not to. Obviously, they are slow, fragile and mechanical. And, since they run on smoke, if you let the smoke out they won't run anymore.
My concerns extend further and even to large CF cards too. They are so small to begin with, what's the point of committing everything to one large card? Isn't it safer to carry several small-medium cards?
I don't shoot raw that often... it's just not mission critical for motorsports photography. So, a 128mb or a 256mb is comparable to a "roll" in my opinion. And, god forbid I lose one, (physically or mechanically) I haven't lost everything... just one "roll."
I'm sure there are arguments against my logic... but I thought I'd share my two cents.
John...Show more →
A while back, microdrives had more of an advantage because they would buy you a lot more storage space than CF at the same price. Now the price difference between 1GB CF and 1GB microdrives has been reduced. I use a combo of 3 1GB microdrives with my 1D when shooting sports. They keep up just fine, and I've NEVER had any problems with wiating for files to write before clearing the buffer, or anything of that sort. They might be slow on some other cameras, but certainly not on the 1D. I have a couple CF cards sitting around that are slower than my microdrives.
I'll give you the fact that microdrives are fragile. They need to be treated with respect. If you do that though, they'll last a very very long time. Two of my 1GB microdrives are over 2 years old each. They are used heavily probably 3 to 4 days out of each week, and have never given me any problems. I recently picked up a third microdrive to buy me a little more storage space while on the road. The price difference between a fast CF card and microdrive is still substantial enough to make me choose the microdrive.
As I said in an earlier post, I've lost two major namebrand CF cards out of the blue. They too were treated with care when they died. However, all my microdrives are still plugging along. If you read these forums a lot, you'll see that there are also a lot of horror stories about CF cards going bad. I think the microdrive stories just seem to draw more attention because people expect them to die very quickly.
|
Oops, I meant to say "MagicStor", not MicroStor. Just changed the original post. Yeah, I was hoping they'd be okay too. Looks like the vendor that I purchased my MagicStor from has agreed to credit me towards a 2GB Hitachi drive. Unfortunately, he won't have them until next month, but I can wait.
After seeing the IBM drive that fell out of the back of the photographer's camera, I was convinced to use CF. Even though the fall was only 5 feet (the body was on the tripod), the drive was toast. It only made some clicking noises and failed to be recognized.
could get it to work again. A tech support guy at the vendor's firm actually agreed with me that this brand appears to have a high failure rate. Too bad as they were really priced right compared to the IBM/Hitachi brands. I've got the Hitachi 2 GB on order, but I think that will probably be my last Microdrive (it will be my fourth). I like their capacity, but can't afford the risk. I do believe that, generally, CF cards are much more reliable and I will try to stay with them in the future.
that would sway me!