PARK RIDGE, Ill. IBM Corp. announced Tuesday (June 20) that it is boosting the storage capacity, cutting the power requirements, and enhancing the performance of its half-dollar-sized hard-disk drive, the Microdrive.
IBM executives hope the improved drive will appeal to users of digital cameras, audio players, and palmtop computers. In the 11 months since its introduction, the Microdrive has met with limited success in those particular markets, mainly because of its relatively high cost. The product was introduced last July at a unit price of $499.
The improved version of the drive boosts the unit's storage capacity from 340 Megabytes to 1 gigabyte. IBM engineers also cut the unit's power draw by about 15 percent and raised its maximum data rate from 3.2 Mbytes/second to 4.2 Mbytes/s. The company plans to sell the new version for $499. IBM said it will also offer a 512-Mbyte Microdrive for $399, and will offer the original 340-Mbyte model for $299.
Capacity tripled
IBM engineers said they required no major technical breakthrough to triple the capacity of the new Microdrive. They simply adopted the aerial density used in the company's 2.5-inch notebook-type drives. By employing an aerial density of 15.2 Gbits per square inch, instead of the old 5.04 Gbits per square inch density, they immediately drove the unit's capacity up to 1 Gbyte.
“The original drive didn't use state-of-the-art densities,” said John Osterhout, director of marketing for the Microdrive at IBM in San Jose, Calif. “So now we're just catching up.” IBM initially used the more conservative aerial densities for reliability reasons, Osterhout said.
By packing more bits of data onto the drive, IBM also realized other advantages. For example, the new Microdrive disk doesn't need to spin as fast, engineers said. As a result, the company was able to reduce the disk speed from 4,500 rpm to 3,600 rpm. That, in turn, resulted in a decrease in current draw, from 300 mA to 250 mA, and a subsequent power drop. The tighter packing of bits also yielded the higher 4.2 Mbytes/s maximum sustained data rate.
The new drives could be an important advance for professional photographers because it will allow them to store between 1,000 and 2,000 digital photos on a single drive. Many photographers currently use flash memory cards to store photos, but some of these cards will only store about a dozen photos.
The 1-Gbyte drive could also have an effect on personal audio players, which would hold the equivalent of about 15 CDs with the Microdrive, IBM said.
But the improvements won't have a significant effect on the Microdrive's success in the digital camera market, industry analysts said. “There's no question that the Microdrive will dominate professional photography,” said Jim Porter, president of Disk/Trend Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.). “The question is how far it will extend into the market below that.”
Porter says that the largest segment of the digital camera market lies between the $300 and $500 price points. In that segment, a 1-Gbyte Microdrive would more than double the cost of a camera from $300 to $800. “It's hard to be optimistic about its chances at that level,” Porter said. “It's far more likely to be successful at $1,000 and up.”
Several camera makers, including Nikon, Canon, Minolta, and Kodak, have designed high-end digital models with CompactFlash Type II memory slots, which makes them compatible with the Microdrive, IBM executives said.
A few camera companies have also introduced Microdrive-compatible consumer models. These include Canon, Casio, Sanyo, and Epson.
Voice factor
But the biggest application for the Microdrive may lie in the area of handheld computers, analysts said. The Microdrive's increased storage capacity and decreased power requirements may one day play a key role, especially when voice-recognition software takes hold. Most current handheld computers offer 1-to-4 Mbytes of storage, which isn't enough to support voice recognition.
“The voice-activated shirt-pocket computer has the potential to make a big impact on mobile computing,” Porter said. “But you need several hundred Mbytes of storage to make it work. This technology could provide the missing element.” Porter said he believes that a shirt-pocket voice-activated computer could one day replace millions of notebook computers.
Until that time, however, IBM executives could struggle in their search for a big Microdrive market. The market for digital cameras is about 5-to-6 million units per year, with the vast majority being lower-priced models.
So while the Microdrive has been honored with more than a dozen technical innovation awards, its near-term market remains limited. “It's one thing to develop great technology,” Osterhout said. “But it's another to get consumers to pay for it.”
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