Microdrives

The Microdrive was developed and launched in 1999 by IBM with a capacity of 170 MB and 340 MB. At that time, it was the smallest hard drive in the world. The capaicity increased over the years and at 2006 reached 8 GB.
'Microdrive' is a brand name for a 1-inch hard disk designed to fit into 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'.

These drives fit into any CompactFlash Type II slot. However, they generally consume more power than flash memory due to internal moving parts and therefore may not work in some low-power cameras. However, they have some benefits over flash memory in terms of the way that data is stored and manipulated. Microdrives, at present can store 8 GB or more, but must be formatted for a file system which supports this capacity, such as FAT 32 or NTFS, which may not be supported by older CompactFlash cameras. Some older cameras which support the CF II fromat only support 2 GB. Hitachi have promised a 20 GB version for May 2007!