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ok question:

I've been involved in photography for over 25 years.  Just got my first digital camera.  What is the advantage to using a micro drive card vs a cf card?  If the cf card is a 2G card and the the micro drive is a 2G card, what is the difference?


This is a preference but I find that it will be relatively universal.  Microdrives are actually little harddrives, they have moving parts, a spinning magnetic drive basically like a small harddrive.  A Compact Flash (CF) Card is solid state media.  In most practical terms now the CF card is faster, and by far more durable as there is no moving parts to break, a microdrive can be relatively durable, but it has moving and spinning parts so a severe shock, water damage, dropping, banging can cause damage that requires more than a photo recovery software to recover it may actually require a date rescue company to open and rebuild the drive in order to salvage it from damage if it all possible.  CF cards have been known and I myself have taken a few and intentionally thrown them into a washing machine and dryer, in fact I put one card through 4 wash and dry cycles and left the card overnight to dry than inserted it into a card reader and not only did it work, it the data was fully usable.  And it worked to use again in camera as well.  That is not the case with a microdrive.  That all said I did use the first 340MB and 1GB microdrives back when brand new (around 2000) and they lasted and served very well for over 2 years.  The second major issue is power usage, a CF card requires far less power consumption than a microdrive, and you will notice a reduction of performance in speed of write times, read times and also a shortened battery life of the camera between charges.

This is nothing against microdrives as they are and have been a great and reliable media for years, but todays low cost CF cards and durability, sizes and low power consumption makes them in my mind a better alternative, I am also a fan of SD cards as well and use both in various cameras and digital HD cameras successfully.

Stephen Eastwood
http://www.StephenEastwood.com