Verbatim CompactFlash 1GB

The flash-card from Verbatim carries no information about its speeds on the package and on the card sticker. Although you will have no difficulty figuring out how much storage space this medium offers, as there is a bright yellow sticker saying “1GB”. The corporate web-site doesn’t offer any interesting info about this product, and even the 47011 part number didn’t help us to find out anything.

Inside the package we discovered a flash-card in a transparent plastic case only. The cost of this solution is around $220.

IBM/Hitachi Microdrive

Our last testing participant today is IBM Microdrive, which is now manufactured by Hitachi Company. It is a completely different product compared with the CompactFlash cards. From the historical point of view, it was the first one to reach the sacred Gigabyte storage bar and after that the flash-cards caught up with it.

In fact, it only looks similar to a flash-card. Unlike these solid-state memory media, IBM Microdrive is a fully-fledged hard disk drive, but a very tiny one. The spindle rotation speed of IBM Microdrive is 3600rpm. The average seek time equals 12ms. The buffer is 128KB big, but the biggest part of it – 68KB - is used for firmware. The data transfer rate equals 4.2MB/s. this product is compatible with CompactFlash Type II standard. The only thing you should pay special attention to when you use IBM Microdrive in devices supporting this specification, is to make sure that the manuals of these devices do not approve of using IBM Microdrive with them. However, this is not a very frequent case, I should say.

Microdrive device supplied with the IBM Travel Kit costs $200. Of course most of the sum refers to the Microdrive itself and just a little bit to the PC Card adapter.