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The Microdrive is a brand name for a miniature, 1-inch hard disk designed to fit in a Compact Flash (CF) Type II slot. The release of similar drives by other makers has led to them often being referred to as 'microdrives'. However, 'microdrive' is not a genericized trademark and manufacturers other than IBM up to 2003 and Hitachi after do not officially refer to these drives as Microdrives. Some other companies, such as Sony, have licensed the name and sell re-branded versions.
These drives fit into any CompactFlash II slot; however, they may consume more power than flash memory (currents on the order of 190 mA, peak 310 mA, at 3.3 V) and therefore may not work in some low-power devices (e.g. handheld computers). Nevertheless, they have some benefits over flash memory in terms of the way data is stored and manipulated. Microdrives can store 8 GB or more, but must be formatted for a file system which supports this capacity, such as ext3 or NTFS, which may not be supported by older CompactFlash hosts, but it is possible to partition a drive so it will contain a partition less than 4 GB.
The Microdrive was developed and launched in 1999 by IBM with a capacity of 170 MB, which was expanded to 8 GB by 2006. They weigh about 16 g (~1/2 oz), with dimensions of 42.8×36.4×5 mm (1.7×1.4×.2 in). These were the smallest hard drives in the world at the time. From 1999 to 2003 they were known as IBM Microdrives, and from 2003 as Hitachi Microdrives, when Hitachi bought IBM's hard drive division. Microdrive™ was a registered trademark by IBM and Hitachi for each period.
IBM initially released a 170 MB and 340 MB model. The next year 512 MB and 1 GB models were announced and became available. In December 2002 Hitachi bought IBM's disk drive business, including the Microdrive technology and brand. By 2003, under Hitachi, bigger 2 GB models came out. Over the years, even larger sizes have become available. There are licensed branded Sony models called Sony Microdrive; these are re-badged Hitachi made models.
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Hitachi 4GB Microdrive