5GB Microdrives Hitting The Market -- From MP3 Players

[Janak Parekh]

To the best of my knowledge, both the new Creative MuVo2 and the Rio Carbon use the <a href="http://www.dpreview.com/news/0406/04060901seagate5gbmd.asp">new Seagate 5GB Microdrives</a>. Instructions have started floating on the 'Net as to how to extract these -- supposedly, they do work much like the Hitachi 4GB did on earlier Creative units. You can get instructions on extracting the drive from a MuVo2 <a href="http://www.vr-zone.com/?i=1249&s=1">here</a>, and from the Carbon <a href="http://www.greghughes.net/rant/PermaLink,guid,e9bdfa3f-da94-4c6e-a2f9-5ff3260040f1.aspx">here</a>.<br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/parekh-20040915-Seagate5GB.jpg" /><br /><br />Units have also <a href="http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=50519&item=3839613300&rd=1">started appearing on eBay</a>, as it's apparently cheaper to extract it than to buy it standalone. Of course, if you decide to try the extraction trick yourself, realize that you're doing it at your own risk. That said, if anyone has played with the 5GB units in their Pocket PCs, report back and let us know!

[Mark Johnson]

I love my Carbon, but I didn't realize it's worth more dead than alive. It would be tough to take a screwdriver to it when I've only had it two weeks, but I'm tempted...

[maximus]

Ok, so the temptation is to buy a muvo2, get the 5G drive out, replace it with an older 1G microdrive. And give the muvo2 to a friend as birthday present (of course you have to tell him/her that this is the 'limited edition - 1G version'). That way, you'll get 2 types of satisfaction :
1. The new 5G drive on your PDA, filled with oggs, movies and camera images.
2. The happy look on your friend's face.

By the way, the current price of the muvo2 has gone down to $240 in singapore. 5G drive for $240, while the magicstor 2.2Gdrive cost $260. This is weird economy indeed.

[foebea]

Doin it tomorrow! Ill let ya know how it goes . . .

:devilboy:

[manywhere]

Can anyone point me in the general direction of a net store that sells the 5G Muvos and that ships outside North America?

[Oleander]

Can anyone point me in the general direction of a net store that sells the 5G Muvos and that ships outside North America?

If you like me find yourself in that situation more often than you like, then a mail forwarding service might be useful:

http://www.mail-forwarding-advisor.com/index.html

I use USA Box and I'm quite happy with the arrangement.

More on topic. I thought that the new drives were of the type that could not be extracted from the mp3-player?

[wocket]

I thought that the new drives were of the type that could not be extracted from the mp3-player?

However, we can't be sure that the later batches of the Seagate ST1 drives in the MuVo² FM can work but the first batch does work.
from the virtual-zone article!

Thats what happened with the older MuVo 2's

[Sean Murphy]

I took one for the team...

http://www.mobilegadgetnews.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2170

:) :D

[rob_ocelot]

I thought that the new drives were of the type that could not be extracted from the mp3-player?

However, we can't be sure that the later batches of the Seagate ST1 drives in the MuVo² FM can work but the first batch does work.
from the virtual-zone article!

Thats what happened with the older MuVo 2's

It's odd that Creative went with a new drive that could be harvested from the MuVo², especially after the debacle with the 4gig drives. The situation though was good for Creative as people were buying the units as fast as they could make them, but bad for Hitachi who was losing profits because they could not justify the huge mark up they were charging for the bare drives. Creative could have probably cared less if people were cracking the units open like Thanksgiving turkeys as long as the 4gig Muvos were flying off the shelves.

I don't see the same situation happening with the 5gig MuVo because Seagate is charging a reasonale price for the bare drives. Heck, they are practically the same price as the Muvo! There is no real advantage to buying the units and harvesting the drive unless you have a few CF cards that you want to get rid of. The bare MuVo's that housed 4gig drives were selling at about $20-30 on ebay, but there's no $100-150 profit to be made by harvesting these new drives. The unique economic situation with the 4gig drives was created by Hitachi alone -- being greedy, pure and simple.

[Scott R]

Are these Seagate drives any more energy efficient than the Hitachi drives? I suspect that they're about the same.

Sean, have you done any tests to see how using this drive has affected your battery life? Thanks,

Scott

[foebea]

Here is the second confirmation. Rio Carbon went under the knife, no broken screws, completely reusable when complete, and now iPaq 2215 has 4.7 gigs free. I put the card in, ce said would you like to format, I hit yes and two seconds later it was done and now there are a number of movies on the microdrive.

At this point let me recommend BetaPlayer to those who havent used it. the latest version (unstable 0.091) is very very nice and has full microdrive support.

Yay for progress! :twisted:

[BugDude10]

My only concern with harvesting the drive from the Carbon is, what do you do if the drive fails? You certainly can't get any service from Seagate, since you didn't buy the retail package; and you almost certainly won't get any service from Rio, since you voided your warranty when you took the player apart.

Since the retail package is anticipated to be reasonably priced (~$200 USD, last I read), I'll probably just wait for that.

Just my $0.02.

[foebea]

they can anticipate all they want, but a 512 cf card at the place where I got the carbon is still about 130-250$ (depending on brand and features) and all the microdrives I have seen for sale are all hugely expensive.

They can anticipate whatever they want, but while they are busy guessing what final price will be, I will be watching movies and selecting from a large variety of music for my ride home.

If the drive fails I'm out 225 bucks. I understood that before I started, and I wasn't even sure it would even work in the ipaq. I remember once I payed about 300 dollars for a 20 meg drive. Prices are coming down, but i would not expect to see the 5 gb drive for 200 dollars until the 40gb drives are out at 10 grand.

I may be wrong, but I can also take some 3200 4megapixel pictures without changing cards. Of course thats more than I will likely need, but on some weekend trips i have burned through both my 256 meg chip and the 128 and been out of luck until i could get home.

Wooo!

[foebea]

I was about to scream for a second there.

When I started the first test video (160 megs per hour) it was very 'stuttery' (to make up a word). after going through settings I found it is filling the 16 meg buffer during this time and it was like this for about 10 seconds, then the movies played through without issue all the way to the end. Skipping through commercials and fastforwarded played exactly as on the regular cf or sd card. very satisfying.

This was not a battery test though, I will report on that when i get off work and test it out.

edit - tested with microdrive mode turned off and learned something nice. I don't need to use the buffer at all really. in a 15 minute test there were no noticable dropped frames or lag, and it started right away with no lag.

Also there is a huge difference in skipping around. With sd or cf I try to never click on the progress bar at the bottom of the movie to move it around, with the SD card it generally started playing the audio right away, but video may take 15 or 20 seconds to joing back up, and in some cases it never came back until i restarted the movie.
From this microdrive thing it jumps from beginning to end and back again just like a regular computer, only about a quarter second delay from when you click to when it starts playing in the new part of the movie.

[Maced]

I'm seeing a major opportunity for reselling profits:

A. Remove 5GB HD from Rio mp3 player
B. Sell 5GB HD for ~240 dollars
C. Buy a smaller 1GB HD for ~80 dollars & put it in the rio (http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=20-160-051&depa=1)
D. Sell new 1GB rio mp3 player for ~150 dollars

Profits: ~50 dollars PER mp3 player!

[gpspassion]

Sounds attractive indeed, but having been burnt with a 4Gb Hitachi that failed me after running for a couple weeks (happened on an old 340mb IBM too a couple of years ago), I'd recomend getting the an MD that comes with a warranty!

[Arqentus]

Are these Seagate drives any more energy efficient than the Hitachi drives? I suspect that they're about the same.

Sean, have you done any tests to see how using this drive has affected your battery life? Thanks,

Scott

The Seagate hd is listed on there site, inc the power consumption

http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/manuals/external/st1_pm.pdf

Startup Current ( peak ): 300mA ( thats from no idel disk activity )
Seek power (typical 3.3V) 226 mA
Read/write power (typical 3.3V) 300/310 mA
Performance idle mode (typical 3.3V) 200 mA
Low power idle mode (typical 3.3V) 90 mA
Standby/Sleep mode (typical) 30 mA

Info on the mode's:

Spinup power
Spinup power is measured from the time of power-on to the time that the drive spindle reaches operating speed.
• Seek mode
During seek mode, the read/write actuator arm moves toward a specific position on the disc surface and does
not execute a read or write operation. Servo electronics are active. Seek mode power is measured based on
three random seek operations every 100 msecs. This mode is not typical.
• Read/write power and current
Read/write power is measured with the heads on track, at the moment while the head is writing/reading
from/to disc. It is performed with 100% duty cycle of write/read operation.
• Idle mode power, low
Spindle motor is working normally with actuator unloaded to the parked position.
• Standby mode / Sleep mode
During Standby mode, the drive accepts commands, but the drive is not spinning, and the servo and read/
write electronics are in power-down mode.


I find 90mA for idel mode with roting disk not bad at all ... think the Hitachi was running 160 mA ( on some review i saw a while ago ).

30mA is in standby mode ( no roting disk, head parked ), you need to count a 2 sec delay for the startup. Note: most SD & CF card's hove between 2 and 14mA for standby mode, with the advantage for SD & CF cards, that they don't have a 2 sec delay.

[foebea]

I searched around on Amazon, as no one near me sells microdrives or large CF media, and the cheapest comparable is Lexar 4gb CF card for 650$. Now even ignoring the fact of the card from the Rio being 5gb instead of 4, if I was going to get a card with a warrantee than I am paying enough to buy almost 3 of the mp3 players for slaughter.

If the card i have now lasts for a few years, I'll be happy. If it dies in the next week and I could afford to double the cost (still less than lexar) I'm still cheaper than the card with warrentee.

If the card does last for say, 8 months or a year or so, there might be a compatible 6gb player for 240$, who knows? free upgrade and i'm still less than today price of the card from amazon

It's a calculated risk, and its fun :D

Not simply a WBIC, but more of a Why, Because This I Can Afford.

I use BeyondTV to record the shows I want to watch, and copy them to 2 sd cards and a cf card. Because the mp3 player is compatible, I no longer have to do that for at least a little while. If it was not possible at all, I would be shuffling cards with no break because i cannot justify 700$ (after taxes and shipping) worth of storage for the pda. 240? that I can handle.

0X

[maximus]

I'm seeing a major opportunity for reselling profits:

A. Remove 5GB HD from Rio mp3 player
B. Sell 5GB HD for ~240 dollars
C. Buy a smaller 1GB HD for ~80 dollars & put it in the rio (http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=20-160-051&depa=1)
D. Sell new 1GB rio mp3 player for ~150 dollars

Profits: ~50 dollars PER mp3 player!

pssstt. Lets keep it low. Your post might create competition :mrgreen:

[foebea]

Here is my report . . .

Hardware used: 2215 iPaq with 512 SD, a Sacrificial Rio Carbon's 5gb CF
Software used: Betaplayer 0.091 unstable with asf (wmv) unstable codec (I think it's very reasonable and full featured.. not that unstable at all really)
Snacks consumed: Taco Bell nachos, medium Dr. Pepper
Favorite color: Orange

Using Betaplayer with a Microdrive Buffer of 16000KB to watch Stargate episodes at 312kbs and skipping the commercials by skipping ahead 40 seconds per click, and then back by 10 seconds per click if i skip too far, I was able to watch 3 and a half episodes before the 20% warning came on.

Guestimating 12 minutes of commercials per episode, that's about 168 minutes of movie playback without charging, which is plenty for almost any movie.

Playing from a regular CF card, I was able to watch 2 movies of about 1.5 hours with about 30% battery life remaining.

There is a significant drain with the CFHD versus CF solid state, but I think it may prove worth the tradeoff in the long run. Currently I have 5 albums of mp3, 3 movies, a dozen or so hour long tv shows and I am only using about 55% of the card.

Overall, here are my 15 hours later feelings on the deal. I would rate this experience a 4 out of 5 based on ease of the modification and implementation on the pocket pc. I did not have to install any new software, everything works exactly as before. Only bigger. whether the drive dies tomorrow or next year would not change my rating, as thats a risk anytime you deal with hardware.

Pros:
Fraction of the cost of the estimated street value of the drive when it becomes available (the fraction is about 1/3 or 1/4) Sure it may be cheaper someday, and for that matter so will the terabyte processor. If you were a gamer, and could buy a HDTV receiver which for some reason used an ATI video card with 4 gigs of ram and a 3 ghz GPU, and all you had to do to make it work in your system is void the warrenty on a 400 dollar device, I could understand why you would do it. who wouldnt want 20K frames per second in counterstrike. I know, it may be a bad analogy, but it works for me :)

Monster sized storage for this type of device allows for a wide variety of files available at your fingertips. It can be used in pretty much anything which is compliant with both CF Type 1 and 2.

cool factor - be the envy of your friends in a geeky kind of way. I certainly was the envy of the guy that got to circuit city a few minutes after me, as I got the last rio in the store, and there wont be more for a week. It was the third store I went to.

save time by putting 5 gb of whatever you use on the drive at a time, rather than having to repeat the process with 256, 512 or a gig every few days

Cons:
No Warrentee. If you break it, you already bought it and unless your really neat with the surgury they will not take it back. (The MuVo2 has a warrenty void if broken seal, the Rio has no such seal, and I saw nothing on the box to the contrary, so I guess its may still technically be under warrentee, dont take my word for it though)

Movable parts means more chance of failure. I still have a 50 meg hard drive which works fine, but one of my 120 gig drives died shortly after purchase. It may work forever or it could die in an hour. This goes back to No Warrentee.

Physical Size. As this is a hard disk, it is larger that a normal cf card. On normal cards, there is a lip which helps you to take the card out easily. There is no such lip on the hard disk cf. If you do this, I recommend getting a card puller thingee shaped like a 'V' to remove the card. You know the type. The card comes out as easily as a regular card, but as there is not much to hold onto except for two very small lips on the short ends of the card it can be difficult. Get a card puller. Don't break your iPaq.

Reduced Battery Life. Unless you live on a beach and go into town once a week for food and to charge your iPaq, this should not be a problem. I let it charge overnight, at work, and sometimes on the drive to and fro when I am using it for audible books or music. The only time I am far from a power source and I use the device is when I am at a coffee shop, most times the usage there is low. Not too big an issue for me, but I can see where it could be for some users.

[Scott R]

foebea, to be fair, the 4GB CF card for $650 is solid-state, so no spinning disk (i.e., less battery consumption) and, theoretically, it should be faster. What you really need to compare this to, IMO, are the microdrives (note that not everyone calls their CF spinning disk drives by that name). There haven't been many companies making the higher capacities yet (Hitachi, I think, was it) so less competition meant higher prices. I think that will change over the next few months. In the mean time, if you can get by with less storage, I found a Magicstor 2.2GB CF (microdrive/spinning disk) via Pricegrabber for as low as $139. Not a bad deal.

Again, I suspect that within the next 2-3 months we'll see standalone 4GB CF spinning disk cards selling for $200.

Scott

[foebea]

Honestly I was not looking at what kind of card it is, I was looking at capacity. When you find a CF or SD card of 5gb or more for under 250, Please let the editors know where because I'm sure people would be interested in it.

For now though, there is a no warrentee 5gb CF drive for under 250. :)

[Arqentus]

Honestly I was not looking at what kind of card it is, I was looking at capacity. When you find a CF or SD card of 5gb or more for under 250, Please let the editors know where because I'm sure people would be interested in it.

For now though, there is a no warrentee 5gb CF drive for under 250. :)


SANDISK CompactFlash 4 GB 319,34 €

Germany:

http://www.styleyourlife.de/?/produktinfo.asp?z=&art_nr=SDSDB-256-780&wid=010303style&zz=nix

[foebea]

Thats 387.712 USD which is way out of my budget, as stated in a previous post.
WBTICA

[Arqentus]

Thats 387.712 USD which is way out of my budget, as stated in a previous post.
WBTICA

Maybe for you in the US, but for European buy'ers that's cheap ... Don't forget, your 250$ player / hd, get's taxed up the wazoo down here. ( the world doesent resolve around the US )

You asked for a competitive price, you got one ... Try Buy.com or some other US only shop, and i bet you can find those 4GB Sandisk's even cheaper then your eu -> $ conversion ( remember, the eu price has import tax & 16% tax already included -- people keep forgetting that us $ price's in general are with 0 tax listed online ).

[foebea]

Maybe for you in the US, but for European buy'ers that's cheap ... Don't forget, your 250$ player / hd, get's taxed up the wazoo down here. ( the world doesent resolve around the US )

Wow, i didnt mean to insult you in any way, I was not refering to any particular country at all, and i did not say it was expensive for us in the states, and i'm sure not all europeans would agree that is cheap, so lets not even go there please.


You asked for a competitive price, you got one ... Try Buy.com or some other US only shop, and i bet you can find those 4GB Sandisk's even cheaper then your eu -> $ conversion ( remember, the eu price has import tax & 16% tax already included -- people keep forgetting that us $ price's in general are with 0 tax listed online ).
That is almost twice the price for 4/5 the space. not very competitive.

It is getting a little hot in here, so I will only post again I have any more information relating to the topic of 5gb microdrive in rio and muvo2.

[Len M.]

Would someone who has one of the Seagate ST1 drivers please run SPB Benchmark on it (installed in an iPAQ or other Windows PDA) and post the XML file here (or mail it to me)?

We'll post the results on our benchmark Web page.


Len Moskowitz
Core Sound
www.core-sound.com

[remintola]

I pulled one of these, but cannot format it in my Ipaq (PCMCIA expansion paq w/ CF type II adapter). Can you please inform how to go about FAT32 format? Is there some sort of write protection? THanks for your time in responding.

Rick

[Len M.]

Get a copy of Softwinter's Storage Tools:

http://www.softwinter.com/storagetools.html


Len Moskowitz
Core Sound
www.core-sound.com
Home of PDAudio[/url]

[MikeBroderick]

Confirmation!

For any of you who (like me) got stuck with a 'locked' microdrive from an MP3 player (either the Hitachi or Seagate cards) I have confirmed a work around solution.

The microdrive from the earlier Rio Carbon players WILL WORK. I purchased a used one from e-bay with a serial # 364xxxxxxxxx. The CF microdrive card from that player did not have any firmware code indicated on the back label and it works perfectly in my HP2215.

Also, Both the Hitachi 4gig OEM white label card and the ST1 5 gig card I have (which were useless in anything else) could be recognized by the Rio.

It's a rather involved hack and it requires that you confirm the serial # on the player BEFORE you buy it but it DOES work and its the only solution I have found for these disabled OEM microdrives.

P.S. I have heard that the Rio Carbons up to serial # 44xxxxxxxxxx have the unlocked ST1's but I have only personally confirmed up to the serial # on my player.

[Capt. Nemo]

...For any of you who (like me) got stuck with a 'locked' microdrive from an MP3 player (either the Hitachi or Seagate cards) I have confirmed a work around solution....

It's a rather involved hack and it requires that you confirm the serial # on the player BEFORE you buy it but it DOES work and its the only solution I have found for these disabled OEM microdrives.


I just purchased a S/N #4140000061007 from eBay &amp; can't get my Digital rebel (ER 02) or my desktop reader to read the card. Can you please post your work around? Thanks.