0:38 3.5" SL drives like you show here didn't become common until the early 90s. The 3.5" drive that was introduced in 1983 was the Rodime RO252, which was HH, or double the size of that drive. It displaced half height 5.25" drives which were introduced just the year before by Microscience International as the HH-612. Only two years before that, the Seagate ST-506, the first 5.25" hard drive at all was introduced. The ST-506 replaced the IBM 62PC Piccolo of 1979, which was an 8" drive ,the first of it's kind. Technology during that era was moving scarily fast. The Rodime RO252 is a 10MB drive, just 3 years earlier a drive 4x the height stored half the data. 0:52 The 2.5" drive introduced in 1988 was the PrairieTek Prairie 120, which was twice the height of the Toshiba you showed. It was the smallest production hard drive in the world at the time of it's introduction. Thinner drives came a few years later, but this "Full height" 2.5 inch form factor was still relevant for enterprise applications until the mid 2000s. 1:21 The first 1.8" hard disk drive was the Integral Viper, in 1993. It was a PC Card, and they were popular for mobile data storage long before the iPod hit shelves. 5:50 The IBM Microdrive isn't "Basically" a Compact Flash card, it IS a compact flash card. It was intentionally designed to be interface and socket compatible. Most devices which support one will support the other. The Microdrive hit production in 1999 and it was the world's smallest production hard drive. You could get original Microdrives in capacities of up to 340MB on a single 1" platter. 11:28 The Toshiba MK4001MTD and MK8003MTD, the smallest hard drives in the world. 4 and 8GB, respectively. I believe they really do use an SD card interface.
Wow, your specific knowledge of early drives is amazing. I really appreciate hearing these details. One day I'm going to revisit the 1" drive in a video of some sort. Unfortunately I have already recently made a video about iPod and 1.8" drives. But I didn't know their real history. I do research these things. But it's hard to find the sort of detailed knowledge you have. Thank you!
@@JanusCycle You do know that with a fly-height of about 100nm, opening these drives outside of a cleanhood means they're dead soon? The 2.5" drive you show operating is actually retreating to the ramp repeatedly because it isn't able to land correctly. The first IBM microdrive was a 1" drive, I think you have the order reversed. At the time of the 1" drives introduction in the ipod, it wasn't possible to fit flash memory of the same capacity into that amount of space. That changed within a year or two.
@@JanusCycle Every time you flick the arm so the head slides off the load ramp and splats on the disk I wince. I was wrong about flash density - it took about 6 years to match the 1inch disk but I wasn't following it anymore as IBM had sold the hdd business to Hitachi because single 3.5" platters where holding so much that backup and access times were suffering and there HDD's were becoming a commodity with less value from increased density. For the previous 20 years, HDD data density had doubled every 1.8 years. The first 1" drive had data tracks spaced about 10 microns apart so there were about ten thousand data tracks on each side. The radial position was servo controlled to about a 0.1 micron as the disk spun.
@@Roomsaver You seem to be right. I thought it was part of the HDD. But it seems to be part of the laptop. I remember IBM was the first, don't know about HP. This is an accelerometer used for the purpose. Fun times! www.analog.com/en/analog-dialogue/articles/using-accelerometers-to-protect-hard-drives.html#
which is wierd because for the longest time apple was known for it's durability. if course now they are known for their gimmick based marketing, hand holding and overpricedness.
Holy crap! The platter inside that SD-sized HDD must be the size of a penny! That's the most impressive thing I've ever seen! Especially for a mechanical device.
There was a time (around the beginning of this century) when I was using a "MASSIVE" 340MB microdrive in my DSLR - the largest solid state ones were 32MB tops at the time I think. I was always humbled knowing that there is a tiny plate spinning inside the CF enclosure... My wallet had also been humbled.
@@dschannel1171 I feels its more the symbian os was still buggy and too ahead of its time in terms of hardware to support it, I had a n8 and e7 had the same issue, few years reincarnated as a windows phone with WP8.1 , they were much better.
The Cowon iAudio6 had just such an 0.85" hard drive in it. The device was small enough that you could easily feel it move a little bit when it spun up.
I have a MicroSD card in my laptop that's 512GB (genuine). I find it mind blowing that something the size of a fingernail can store that much data and more!
The IBM 350 disk drive invented in 1956 stored a mere 3.75 MB and took up the space of two large kitchen refrigerators. This tiny Samsung disk drive stores 80 GB. You will need 21,333 IBM 350 disk drives taking up the space of 42,666 refrigerators to have the same amount of storage as this Samsung disk drive. The 350's cabinet is 60 inches (152 cm) long, 68 inches (172 cm) high and 29 inches (74 cm) wide taking up 12.083 square feet. 21,333 IBM 350 cabinets would take up 257,775 square feet or 5.37 football fields. The IBM 350 disk drive costed $3,200 per month to lease in 1956 or $31,418.12 in 2021. 21,333 IBM 350s would cost $68,265,600 per month to lease in 1956 or $670,242,703.76 in 2021.
Oh my heck, watching that tiny little arm swing on the Microdrive while it's just sitting there plugged into that USB card reader you're holding is... kind of mind-blowing! I've known about Microdrives since right about when they came out about 2 decades ago, but they're still mind-blowing to me all these years later. But then you just said that now it's the SECOND-smallest, OMG!
I'm having Nokia N91 4GB version since 2006. Without any doubt its amazing phone with Supreme Music Experience. Phone stil works perfect except a little bit blurry display. I didn't know that I'm carrying a moving mechanical hard disk with me all the time, and that's world's tiniest HDD! Wow... feels great!!
Look up old watchmakers. They made much tinier things with comparable precision with nothing but primitive mounted files(as in file which you use to file down a piece of metal).
These are not entering watchmaker territory, they greatly surpass it! I don’t have the figures, but the kinds of dust that would make a watch hiccup would totally destroy these drives! The tolerances are orders of magnitude smaller, and need clean rooms to assemble.
It would be cool if they made transparent mechanical hard drives and I can see why they can't for obvious reasons but bright metal, spinning disks and oscillating read arms are aesthetically pleasing to me.
I have heard about the microdrives before, but I never knew that even smaller formfactors existed. The size of that "nanodrive" seems similar to a modern XQD/CFe card, which are also sucessors to the old CF standart. Also this is the best overview about these rare hard drives I have seen so far!
Fascinating. I never knew that such small mechanical drives were once commonplace in commercial products. I remember visiting the Science Museum decades ago and marvelled at the huge pioneering hard drive, which was cut away to expose some of the mechanism. The drive must have been 24 inches in diameter! When the company I worked for in 1978 we got our first word processing system with terminals on desks and a huge drive unit in a special room down the corridor. The diameter of the drives in that unit was around 14 inches, I reckon, and the drive had a capacity of 40 MB. The terminals had local 8 inch floppy drives, too. That's when I started to become interested in computer programming.
Nowadays it would probably be an SSD in an adapter, no questions asked. No way one would find a decent HDD on a decent price. Tho wonder how feasible this was back when you did this, I would sure bet not so nice, those things were sold with like 40GB drives no? (EDIT: OK 80GB 1st models or 64GB SSD... wonder how much it cost back then). Wonder what sizes of SSDs were available back when people wanted them fixed.
@@Kalvinjj I did a Little research and I found that the OG MacBook Air had either an 80gb hdd or 64gb ssd in 2008 and the 64gb ssd was a $1300 optional extra. The most amusing part for me was that the ssd was maybe like 10 percent faster than the 80gb hdd so it’s not like you got a substantially more responsive laptop nor was the ssd substantially better in battery tests.
@@Fhwgads11 damn... That price hurt me more than it had any relevance to me... But yeah that's Apple I guess. That performance difference is quite amusing tho, I do remember that SSDs were quite rough back then, heck when I got my 1st SSD on the SandForce controller era it was pretty absurd of a difference to a mechanical drive, but then some years later and I swap for another cheapest on the market one and it's... significantly faster. These things improved absurdly fast for sure.
The Seagate ST3290A you show at the start was a mid 90s drive, so yes bringing it to the mid 80s would be witchcraft. The capacity of that drive eclipses anything money could buy in the 5.25" form factor and most, if not all 8" mechanisms as well.
My favourite little drives are the 1 inch voice coil units in Compact Flash form factor, manufactured by Seagate and Hitachi also for camera use. They generally hold up to 8Gb. My first drive in about 1987 was a 5.25 Miniscribe 3053 voice coil with 3 platters giving 40MB capacity. It made the most superb sounds when seeking that were easily audible while using the 80286 12MHz PC running MS-DOS 3.X.
I have fond memories of holding my iPod mini up to my ear in fascination with the mechanical sounds it made. I still have it’s drive sitting in the top drawer of my desk.
Really liked this video. Crazy how small things go in a relatively short space of time. Unbelievable that tiny drive was inside a phone.. nice to hear the Nokia boot sequence again.. been a long time.. Looking forward to seeing that spinning drive usb stick :) Nice work 👍
WOW, that sub-1-inch hard disk would blow my mind even MORE than a Microdrive if I could see it open and running, OMG! But being able to see that photo is pretty cool!
"I just happen to have one handy" - That about sums up this video. GREAT content. You pull out examples of each thing you talk about and you take some interesting ones to bits. Subscription Achievement Unlocked.
Normally, I would've been sad, not getting to see what's inside that tiny NOKIA drive. But I like that you didn't destroy it. We don't get these anymore
I had an RCA MP3 player circa 2005 with the 1 inch microdrive. At the time I don't think I fully appreciated how cool that was but looking back on it, I am very impressed. In almost all areas, the "analog" or "gen 1" versions of products always seems more technically impressive than their successor (CRT > LCD) (HDD > SSD) etc. The original formats had a certain degree of magic and mystique to them that was subsequently replaced by cold, logical, and efficient technologies.
I used to actually own a 1 inch portable usb hdd I got from Office max. I think it may have been a Seagate, but I can't find a reference to it ANYWHERE on google. It was about 1.5 x 1.25 inches square white plastic, had a built in usb cable that you slotted into it for storage, and had this little white fake leather pouch with a clear plastic window in the center to store it in. Wish I could find it for photos and model number.... but it was like....late 2003-2004. Somewhere around then.
The Palm LifeDrive had a 4Gb Microdrive in it as well, I remember thinking it was so crazy that a handheld had a spinning drive in it and when I saw some pictures of the Microdrive partially disassembled in a magazine it seemed even more futuristic.
Even if mechanical drives and devices get replaced by non-mechanic alternatives wich way faster and better, I find them very fascinating. My old Camcorder also still has a 30 GB HDD built in :)
They are short-lived oddities used in iPods and bake in the day when flash memory was cost prohibitive to get the desired capacity for handheld portable devices and when multi-gigabyte thumb drives were way too expensive for the average consumer.
2:05 - trust me (I've worked on the insides of a lot of Macs since the 80s), it's really not that unusual at all. Apple often order parts from suppliers like Samsung to meet certain specs and the parts are adorned with both logos. Many models of HD were also made for Apple with custom ROMs on the drives too (again, always dual-logo).
Wow i cant believe that there's an hard drive, a mechanical hard drive as "big" as SD card, i thought Apple iPod drive is already the smallest HDD i will ever seen since i take it apart from my original iPod out of curiosity. I never own iPod mini so i never knew that iPod using mechanical hard drive, back when people craze over iPod mini, people simply call it "Compact Flash" for it storage, while Compact Flash is common especially on digital camera back in early 2000's
They also made double hight/platter 1.8 inch hard drives for larger capacity IPod classic units which also significantly increased the thickness of the higher capacity original IPods! :)
At 15:00 "If I can ever get this interface working, Then I'll be making the worlds smallest mechanical, spinning hard disc usb memory stick" *No. No You won't.* That was done and made commercially available in 2008. The Swissbit Mini S.Valigetta was released in 2008. Had 8 GB storage. Was USB and had a mechanical hard drive in it much smaller than anything you've shown.
Thanks for the info on the Swissbit Mini S.Valigetta. I hadn't heard of that model before. Though at 48mm x 40mm x 17mm, it may contain a Microdrive rather than the smaller 0.85". I've heard of other brands that used these drives. I still think I can go smaller. I appreciate your comment, thank you. www.alavia.net/pm/data/10/pr_sb_svaligetta_classic_engl_200606.htm
@@JanusCycle Having spent a good part of the day looking, I've found mine. Inside you will find: www.businesswire.com/news/home/20060213005130/en/Cornice-Introduces-Ultra-Thin-8GB-and-10GB-Micro-Hard-Drive-Enables-Smaller-and-Thinner-Consumer-Electronics-Devices-Small-Form-Factor-Storage-Innovator-Launches-Its-First-Two-Headed-Storage-Product-and-Decreases-Its-Size-by-40-Percent And, As I've not been able to find any photo's of it close-up internally so, I pop'd the cover off (They were known to over heat so slots were dremmeled into the cover) and thought I'd give you a look. And yes, It still works! i.ibb.co/gmsFX6L/20210111-184100.jpg i.ibb.co/fvzRNF6/20210111-184121.jpg
I had quite a few external SCSI drives back in the day. I had one from a company called Frog (based in Scotland!) The large external SCSI enclosure housed a 2.5" SCSI interfaced HDD with an adapter to the normal "Centronics" style external SCSI connector. It dawned on me at the time that it wasn't an economical way of creating an external SCSI hard drive. When manufacturers stopped making 2.5" SCSI hard drives I recall Apple laptops ending up using a regular 2.5" IDE HDD with a SCSI adaptor board! So much electronics! I found a solution to the lack of drives though - certain printers used a 2.5" SCSI hard drive as an internal buffer - so I bought as many of those kits as I could afford, I ended up using them all in Apple laptops!
That Nokia was made back in the day when technological advancements were actually advancements these days its just same stuff recycled generation to generation with barely any changes.
The IBM 350 disk drive invented in 1956 stored a mere 3.75 MB and took up the space of two large kitchen refrigerators. This tiny Samsung disk drive stores 80 GB. You will need 21,333 IBM 350 disk drives taking up the space of 42,666 refrigerators to have the same amount of storage as this Samsung disk drive. The 350's cabinet is 60 inches (152 cm) long, 68 inches (172 cm) high and 29 inches (74 cm) wide taking up 12.083 square feet. 21,333 IBM 350 cabinets would take up 257,775 square feet or 5.37 football fields. The IBM 350 disk drive costed $3,200 per month to lease in 1956 or $31,418.12 in 2021. 21,333 IBM 350s would cost $68,265,600 per month to lease in 1956 or $670,242,703.76 in 2021.
If only you had your hands on a 5.25” hd I remember working on a 286 and it only had 10mb of storage. Later I had a 386 with a 3” hd with 100mb and I was really surprised in the leap of technology. Even the 286 ram was a whole card compare to the 386 mini memory stick. It’s amazing to see how far computer technology has gone. But to today’s standards personal computers haven’t changed alote the last decade, they have hit nords law. They are just more energy efficient.
"You gotta use a lot of force to get this zero-insertion-force connector in." Nope. If you have to use any noticeable amount of force then either that's not a ZIF socket or you're doing it wrong. ZIF sockets have a locking lever that you snap down after plugging the cable (in this case, or chip, such as a CPU, in other cases) in and that's what keeps the cable tight.
@@JanusCycle: Right, so it's not a ZIF socket like you called it. Unless it really does have a little sliding or swinging lock mechanism and you didn't notice it, and you were trying to plug the FFC into it while it was locked.
The drives were intentionally designed to be the size of a MMC card to maximize compatibility with current designs. Obviously that's only in 2 dimensions, they were way fatter.
That was fascinating. Maybe the Ancient Aliens guy is right. How was humanity able to make something like this without a bit of help? And this is old tech too; we've moved on to solid states, which I know "how" it works, but I couldn't begin to tell you "why" it works. This was a very enjoyable video. Thank you for making it.
0:38 3.5" SL drives like you show here didn't become common until the early 90s. The 3.5" drive that was introduced in 1983 was the Rodime RO252, which was HH, or double the size of that drive. It displaced half height 5.25" drives which were introduced just the year before by Microscience International as the HH-612. Only two years before that, the Seagate ST-506, the first 5.25" hard drive at all was introduced. The ST-506 replaced the IBM 62PC Piccolo of 1979, which was an 8" drive ,the first of it's kind.
Technology during that era was moving scarily fast. The Rodime RO252 is a 10MB drive, just 3 years earlier a drive 4x the height stored half the data.
0:52 The 2.5" drive introduced in 1988 was the PrairieTek Prairie 120, which was twice the height of the Toshiba you showed. It was the smallest production hard drive in the world at the time of it's introduction. Thinner drives came a few years later, but this "Full height" 2.5 inch form factor was still relevant for enterprise applications until the mid 2000s.
1:21 The first 1.8" hard disk drive was the Integral Viper, in 1993. It was a PC Card, and they were popular for mobile data storage long before the iPod hit shelves.
5:50 The IBM Microdrive isn't "Basically" a Compact Flash card, it IS a compact flash card. It was intentionally designed to be interface and socket compatible. Most devices which support one will support the other. The Microdrive hit production in 1999 and it was the world's smallest production hard drive. You could get original Microdrives in capacities of up to 340MB on a single 1" platter.
11:28 The Toshiba MK4001MTD and MK8003MTD, the smallest hard drives in the world. 4 and 8GB, respectively. I believe they really do use an SD card interface.
Wow, your specific knowledge of early drives is amazing. I really appreciate hearing these details. One day I'm going to revisit the 1" drive in a video of some sort. Unfortunately I have already recently made a video about iPod and 1.8" drives. But I didn't know their real history. I do research these things. But it's hard to find the sort of detailed knowledge you have. Thank you!
@@JanusCycle You do know that with a fly-height of about 100nm, opening these drives outside of a cleanhood means they're dead soon? The 2.5" drive you show operating is actually retreating to the ramp repeatedly because it isn't able to land correctly. The first IBM microdrive was a 1" drive, I think you have the order reversed. At the time of the 1" drives introduction in the ipod, it wasn't possible to fit flash memory of the same capacity into that amount of space. That changed within a year or two.
@@bcwbcw3741 I only open drives that are already faulty. Most recently in 'iPod DOOM'. Hopefully more in the future :)
@@JanusCycle Every time you flick the arm so the head slides off the load ramp and splats on the disk I wince. I was wrong about flash density - it took about 6 years to match the 1inch disk but I wasn't following it anymore as IBM had sold the hdd business to Hitachi because single 3.5" platters where holding so much that backup and access times were suffering and there HDD's were becoming a commodity with less value from increased density. For the previous 20 years, HDD data density had doubled every 1.8 years. The first 1" drive had data tracks spaced about 10 microns apart so there were about ten thousand data tracks on each side. The radial position was servo controlled to about a 0.1 micron as the disk spun.
MP3 player: Often dropped or subjected to shocks and abuse.
Apple: Lets put a HDD in one!
Some hard drives detect that they are falling and shut down and park the head before they hit the ground.
Dennis Fox Not familiar with HDDs doing that but HP implements (implemented) it in some of their laptops with an accelerometer
@@Roomsaver You seem to be right. I thought it was part of the HDD. But it seems to be part of the laptop. I remember IBM was the first, don't know about HP. This is an accelerometer used for the purpose. Fun times! www.analog.com/en/analog-dialogue/articles/using-accelerometers-to-protect-hard-drives.html#
which is wierd because for the longest time apple was known for it's durability. if course now they are known for their gimmick based marketing, hand holding and overpricedness.
this is exaclty what i thought how did those things keep working
Holy crap! The platter inside that SD-sized HDD must be the size of a penny!
That's the most impressive thing I've ever seen! Especially for a mechanical device.
i have some 0.8 inch hard drives laying they look even more funny cause really tiny
@@dmtd2388 The Nokia N91 used that HDD
@@pepeavalon21 i know i took them off from some old small usb hdd
I’d say they would have had to hire some Austrian watchmakers to build this hd back in 2004 😅
0.85" in diameter
“It’s unusual to see the apple and Samsung logo together.”
Almost the whole iPhone: haha they will never notice.
yay, a half life lover in the coments
@@gordonfreeman6464 :)
Apple devices today have some Samsung electronics in them!
@@CoMinderYT the OLED screen on Apple devices: Cover blown, I repeat. Cover blown!
iPhone screens were LG then Samsung for a while. I think it's still Samsung idunno.
we need mini storage servers of 64 GB using 16 mini 4 GB drives!
@Finn Scott much more than that: the micro SD-Card is now in 1TB available.
They are soooo slow
@@adamabele785 2tb too
@@adamabele785 microsd is flash
@@swagchief98 of course, so is ssd.
There was a time (around the beginning of this century) when I was using a "MASSIVE" 340MB microdrive in my DSLR - the largest solid state ones were 32MB tops at the time I think. I was always humbled knowing that there is a tiny plate spinning inside the CF enclosure... My wallet had also been humbled.
The Nokia N91 part was so much educational to me even today its feelsso awesome that this kinda technology is retrofutureproof
i never even knew hdd's even were that tiny
They weren't use for a specially long time and also definitely not something for the average consumer to be able to buy either.
the N91 phone actually came out in 2005,and the 8GB revision in 2007
Thank you. I stand corrected.
In addition to that, the 8GB version was black and was called Music Edition so the full name was Nokia N91 8GB Music Edition. Quite a mouthful 😅
@@rodak_ Good concept but buggy as hell, it didnt do one thing well without crashing.
@@handymanr4729Well... You probably dropped the phone on floor, and you might know, hard drives can't get impact or it gets damaged.
@@dschannel1171 I feels its more the symbian os was still buggy and too ahead of its time in terms of hardware to support it, I had a n8 and e7 had the same issue, few years reincarnated as a windows phone with WP8.1 , they were much better.
The Cowon iAudio6 had just such an 0.85" hard drive in it. The device was small enough that you could easily feel it move a little bit when it spun up.
I have a MicroSD card in my laptop that's 512GB (genuine). I find it mind blowing that something the size of a fingernail can store that much data and more!
Wait until you hear about the 1TB sd card
Kingston makes 2tb usb sticks ssd can be m.2 and have 2tb or more and 2.5 and 4 tb or more, i heard sandisk made a 1tb sd card
@pro at evrything yes
I have the 400GB one lel.
The IBM 350 disk drive invented in 1956 stored a mere 3.75 MB and took up the space of two large kitchen refrigerators. This tiny Samsung disk drive stores 80 GB. You will need 21,333 IBM 350 disk drives taking up the space of 42,666 refrigerators to have the same amount of storage as this Samsung disk drive. The 350's cabinet is 60 inches (152 cm) long, 68 inches (172 cm) high and 29 inches (74 cm) wide taking up 12.083 square feet. 21,333 IBM 350 cabinets would take up 257,775 square feet or 5.37 football fields. The IBM 350 disk drive costed $3,200 per month to lease in 1956 or $31,418.12 in 2021. 21,333 IBM 350s would cost $68,265,600 per month to lease in 1956 or $670,242,703.76 in 2021.
Oh my heck, watching that tiny little arm swing on the Microdrive while it's just sitting there plugged into that USB card reader you're holding is... kind of mind-blowing! I've known about Microdrives since right about when they came out about 2 decades ago, but they're still mind-blowing to me all these years later. But then you just said that now it's the SECOND-smallest, OMG!
Awwwwww!!!! 😍😍😍😍😍 That tiny little hard drive is just so cute!!!!
Absolutely, the only word that came to mind was "cute" haha.
@@YeOldeKamikaze *how dare you interrup my vibes*
I'm having Nokia N91 4GB version since 2006. Without any doubt its amazing phone with Supreme Music Experience. Phone stil works perfect except a little bit blurry display. I didn't know that I'm carrying a moving mechanical hard disk with me all the time, and that's world's tiniest HDD! Wow... feels great!!
I'm glad to hear that you are still enjoying this amazing and unique phone.
@@JanusCycle suprised your cellular network is still compatible with it!
Never thought how small HDD can get back in the day, very interesting piece of engineering they achieved
Look up old watchmakers. They made much tinier things with comparable precision with nothing but primitive mounted files(as in file which you use to file down a piece of metal).
@@NGC1433 watch precision is not even close to hard drive precision
@@NGC1433 hard disk are technically nano scale
like how do they fit such machinery, the spinning motor, the magnetic coil, the servo for the rod, and even temperature sensor etc etc.. so crazy!
4GB in a phone back in 2004 is actually HUGE
It's like having 1TB today
Not really. Even for 2004, 4GB was puny.
@@hexagonist23 phones in 2004 only had a few megs. you needed microsd
4 GB in 2004 was very very small for a PC HDD, but very large for portable USB storage.
tomtom go910 had a 20GB hdd in in that was the 0.85 inch drive
I didnt get that much storage in a phone until 2012 lol
I had a 12 GB micro drive in thumb drive form back in the day. They announced a 16 GB model, but terminated the line before releasing it.
Let me guess: this is when flash memory was still bad? Like 512mb in a flash stick?
@@neyoid not necessarily bad, just terribly expensive
Too bad, 16GB thumbdrive is still a relevant thing today. Fitting 16gb on spinning platters in that form factor would just be amazing to see.
Those tiny drives are so small, the mechanical bits are entering watchmaker territory!
I wonder how durable they were compared to today's HDDs.
These are not entering watchmaker territory, they greatly surpass it! I don’t have the figures, but the kinds of dust that would make a watch hiccup would totally destroy these drives! The tolerances are orders of magnitude smaller, and need clean rooms to assemble.
It would be cool if they made transparent mechanical hard drives and I can see why they can't for obvious reasons but bright metal, spinning disks and oscillating read arms are aesthetically pleasing to me.
I agree. That’s why I plan (dream) on making a USB memory stick with a tiny drive and putting a clear top on the drive :)
The Western Digital Raptor X WD1500AHFD says hello.
This clip is more like a leap through time...
almost forgot I'm in no good 2021
good old days..miss u so much😌😌😌
I have heard about the microdrives before, but I never knew that even smaller formfactors existed. The size of that "nanodrive" seems similar to a modern XQD/CFe card, which are also sucessors to the old CF standart. Also this is the best overview about these rare hard drives I have seen so far!
Seeing the title I was wondering he'd even show the microdrive, what I also thought was the smallest. Those in the phone blew me away.
Fascinating. I never knew that such small mechanical drives were once commonplace in commercial products. I remember visiting the Science Museum decades ago and marvelled at the huge pioneering hard drive, which was cut away to expose some of the mechanism. The drive must have been 24 inches in diameter! When the company I worked for in 1978 we got our first word processing system with terminals on desks and a huge drive unit in a special room down the corridor. The diameter of the drives in that unit was around 14 inches, I reckon, and the drive had a capacity of 40 MB. The terminals had local 8 inch floppy drives, too. That's when I started to become interested in computer programming.
14:52 infinite available space in phone is handy :)
1.8" HDD... that give me PTSD... I had to repair Macbook air that had that form farctor HDD... And I really had problem to find that at that time lol
Nowadays it would probably be an SSD in an adapter, no questions asked. No way one would find a decent HDD on a decent price.
Tho wonder how feasible this was back when you did this, I would sure bet not so nice, those things were sold with like 40GB drives no? (EDIT: OK 80GB 1st models or 64GB SSD... wonder how much it cost back then). Wonder what sizes of SSDs were available back when people wanted them fixed.
@@Kalvinjj I did a Little research and I found that the OG MacBook Air had either an 80gb hdd or 64gb ssd in 2008 and the 64gb ssd was a $1300 optional extra. The most amusing part for me was that the ssd was maybe like 10 percent faster than the 80gb hdd so it’s not like you got a substantially more responsive laptop nor was the ssd substantially better in battery tests.
@@Fhwgads11 damn... That price hurt me more than it had any relevance to me... But yeah that's Apple I guess.
That performance difference is quite amusing tho, I do remember that SSDs were quite rough back then, heck when I got my 1st SSD on the SandForce controller era it was pretty absurd of a difference to a mechanical drive, but then some years later and I swap for another cheapest on the market one and it's... significantly faster. These things improved absurdly fast for sure.
The Seagate ST3290A you show at the start was a mid 90s drive, so yes bringing it to the mid 80s would be witchcraft. The capacity of that drive eclipses anything money could buy in the 5.25" form factor and most, if not all 8" mechanisms as well.
My favourite little drives are the 1 inch voice coil units in Compact Flash form factor, manufactured by Seagate and Hitachi also for camera use. They generally hold up to 8Gb. My first drive in about 1987 was a 5.25 Miniscribe 3053 voice coil with 3 platters giving 40MB capacity. It made the most superb sounds when seeking that were easily audible while using the 80286 12MHz PC running MS-DOS 3.X.
It's funny, because that SD card size disk, could be read on a real SD card slot
Uh no I don't think so.
He said he couldn't get them to spin on SD card readers, so there's that.
I said "it could be", guys.
And I said that because of the size/ format. I never claimed to be 100% possible. So...yeah.
I have fond memories of holding my iPod mini up to my ear in fascination with the mechanical sounds it made. I still have it’s drive sitting in the top drawer of my desk.
Really liked this video. Crazy how small things go in a relatively short space of time.
Unbelievable that tiny drive was inside a phone.. nice to hear the Nokia boot sequence again.. been a long time..
Looking forward to seeing that spinning drive usb stick :)
Nice work 👍
WOW, that sub-1-inch hard disk would blow my mind even MORE than a Microdrive if I could see it open and running, OMG! But being able to see that photo is pretty cool!
"I just happen to have one handy" - That about sums up this video. GREAT content. You pull out examples of each thing you talk about and you take some interesting ones to bits. Subscription Achievement Unlocked.
OMG! That is the cutest and tiniest hard drive I have ever seen!
What an amazing history lesson this video was. Kind thanks, dear sir!
10:19 The battery is bigger than the drive!!
Amazing video and its crazy how small HDD became. In 2 years you can make a video about PC fans. Maybe in 10 years we don't have any PC fans anymore.
It's really amazing to the evolution of hard drive tech and see how much it has changed in such a short time!
I enjoy these types of videos so much. Thank you for sharing your collection with us!
Glad you are getting into them, thanks for your comment :)
great comparisons. Never seen such small drives. Only knew about the apple ipod drives as smallest.
I recently found a 1.8" drive when I was scrapping some broken laptops for useful parts. I thought it was small but that little .85 inch is tiny!
Normally, I would've been sad, not getting to see what's inside that tiny NOKIA drive. But I like that you didn't destroy it. We don't get these anymore
this was great I was trying to find some vids on 1.8" HDD. Thank you!
Me too tnx a lot
Nokia still amazes me to this day. Thank you for making this video.
It's kinda crazy that you can fit more than a terabyte of flash memory into the same volume as the 0.85 inch drive nowadays.
Very fortunate to see those tiny hdd. I didn't even know Nokia was using hdd on their phones.
I had an RCA MP3 player circa 2005 with the 1 inch microdrive. At the time I don't think I fully appreciated how cool that was but looking back on it, I am very impressed. In almost all areas, the "analog" or "gen 1" versions of products always seems more technically impressive than their successor (CRT > LCD) (HDD > SSD) etc. The original formats had a certain degree of magic and mystique to them that was subsequently replaced by cold, logical, and efficient technologies.
Cabaret Voltaire - interesting choice of music!!
9:50 that put a smile on my face
Same
I used to actually own a 1 inch portable usb hdd I got from Office max. I think it may have been a Seagate, but I can't find a reference to it ANYWHERE on google. It was about 1.5 x 1.25 inches square white plastic, had a built in usb cable that you slotted into it for storage, and had this little white fake leather pouch with a clear plastic window in the center to store it in. Wish I could find it for photos and model number.... but it was like....late 2003-2004. Somewhere around then.
The Palm LifeDrive had a 4Gb Microdrive in it as well, I remember thinking it was so crazy that a handheld had a spinning drive in it and when I saw some pictures of the Microdrive partially disassembled in a magazine it seemed even more futuristic.
Even if mechanical drives and devices get replaced by non-mechanic alternatives wich way faster and better, I find them very fascinating. My old Camcorder also still has a 30 GB HDD built in :)
If it ever fails, you know there's SSD's for it. :D
It's interesting how the laws of physics allow some products to be scaled between such extremes.
I didn't even know there was a smaller than 1.8" HDD 😮
Same
They are short-lived oddities used in iPods and bake in the day when flash memory was cost prohibitive to get the desired capacity for handheld portable devices and when multi-gigabyte thumb drives were way too expensive for the average consumer.
2:05 - trust me (I've worked on the insides of a lot of Macs since the 80s), it's really not that unusual at all. Apple often order parts from suppliers like Samsung to meet certain specs and the parts are adorned with both logos. Many models of HD were also made for Apple with custom ROMs on the drives too (again, always dual-logo).
HD=high definition, HDD=Hard Disk Drive. Apple confuses people (yes, I own a disused apple macbook).
I love how the apple hdd has a gaint apple logo and you can clearly see "samsung" in the top left corner.
Wow i cant believe that there's an hard drive, a mechanical hard drive as "big" as SD card, i thought Apple iPod drive is already the smallest HDD i will ever seen since i take it apart from my original iPod out of curiosity.
I never own iPod mini so i never knew that iPod using mechanical hard drive, back when people craze over iPod mini, people simply call it "Compact Flash" for it storage, while Compact Flash is common especially on digital camera back in early 2000's
Cabaret Voiltaire used as a test track.... i approve
so absolutly incredable.
Thanks for this video. Very informative
Epic ad placement timing ☺️
People from those days would be absolutely astonished if they could’ve seen our 1TB micro sd cards, or our tiny NVME storage
Thank you very much sir, that was a really broad and informative review. I like it.
I'm glad to hear that, thanks for letting me know.
I love that 1.8" drive xd
It looks like a model, but actually works
making and designing theses probably harder than making a flash drive.
They also made double hight/platter 1.8 inch hard drives for larger capacity IPod classic units which also significantly increased the thickness of the higher capacity original IPods! :)
thanks for the efforts
14:46 hes actually did it - our dream till this day - the Infinite capacity phone memory...
The really tiny little ones are neat eh! A bit of a wonder that they can work.
My mom got a Nokia C2-01 circa 2012 and it came with a 512 meg sd card. We should still have that card somewhere
Thx, Never knew that there is something like 1.8 inch hhd before watching this video.
Wow I had no idea how tiny hard drives where made...
15:27 guess what is spinning inside my laptop lol
i have a old mac book it has a harddrive
I found this video very interesting. thank you.
That Nokia hard drive is *cute* :-)
God damn you have some really nostalgic treasure out there😘😘😘
At 15:00 "If I can ever get this interface working, Then I'll be making the worlds smallest mechanical, spinning hard disc usb memory stick"
*No. No You won't.*
That was done and made commercially available in 2008. The Swissbit Mini S.Valigetta was released in 2008. Had 8 GB storage. Was USB and had a mechanical hard drive in it much smaller than anything you've shown.
Thanks for the info on the Swissbit Mini S.Valigetta. I hadn't heard of that model before. Though at 48mm x 40mm x 17mm, it may contain a Microdrive rather than the smaller 0.85". I've heard of other brands that used these drives. I still think I can go smaller. I appreciate your comment, thank you.
www.alavia.net/pm/data/10/pr_sb_svaligetta_classic_engl_200606.htm
@@JanusCycle Having spent a good part of the day looking, I've found mine. Inside you will find:
www.businesswire.com/news/home/20060213005130/en/Cornice-Introduces-Ultra-Thin-8GB-and-10GB-Micro-Hard-Drive-Enables-Smaller-and-Thinner-Consumer-Electronics-Devices-Small-Form-Factor-Storage-Innovator-Launches-Its-First-Two-Headed-Storage-Product-and-Decreases-Its-Size-by-40-Percent
And, As I've not been able to find any photo's of it close-up internally so, I pop'd the cover off (They were known to over heat so slots were dremmeled into the cover) and thought I'd give you a look. And yes, It still works!
i.ibb.co/gmsFX6L/20210111-184100.jpg
i.ibb.co/fvzRNF6/20210111-184121.jpg
@@GrymsArchive Holy shit, now that's *SMALL* at 2.16 cm.
The smaller I see a hard drive the more I want one. I never known that harddrives can go as small as a SD card.
I had quite a few external SCSI drives back in the day. I had one from a company called Frog (based in Scotland!) The large external SCSI enclosure housed a 2.5" SCSI interfaced HDD with an adapter to the normal "Centronics" style external SCSI connector. It dawned on me at the time that it wasn't an economical way of creating an external SCSI hard drive. When manufacturers stopped making 2.5" SCSI hard drives I recall Apple laptops ending up using a regular 2.5" IDE HDD with a SCSI adaptor board! So much electronics! I found a solution to the lack of drives though - certain printers used a 2.5" SCSI hard drive as an internal buffer - so I bought as many of those kits as I could afford, I ended up using them all in Apple laptops!
Wow! VERY enlightening 👍🏿
apple and samsung work together all the time, so it’s not uncommon at all to see both brands on a part
The mini and normal hard drive: like father like son
I was completely shocked, I had no idea of those small sizes.
I have a multiple card reader. Some one told me about M.M.C. and that they where very small Hard-Discs. Now I see one.
Most MMC were standard flash. This one is very different indeed.
thanks to the algorithm i've seen something that i probally never seen one in my life
I remember when they put spinning hard drives in a compact flash form factor...was pretty amazing for it's time!
That Nokia was made back in the day when technological advancements were actually advancements these days its just same stuff recycled generation to generation with barely any changes.
When Japan actually had a technological advantage with Toshiba and Hitachi because they are good at miniaturization
Datel released a 4gb hard drive for the Sony PSP, and that was absolutely tiny.
Wow, I just had a look, it looks like a fascinating product. Thanks for mentioning it.
Wow never new we had spinning drives so small
Nice collection of data mediums. Under the premise that Nand Flash is not a magnetic hard disk.
I remember paying an absolute fortune for a 128MB SD card for my Cybikos MP3 player! How far we have come!
I have a couple of working Hitachi Microdrives (non-Apple) and I always thought they were the smallest. Interesting vid :-)
Great video. I had no idea some of these drives existed.
The IBM 350 disk drive invented in 1956 stored a mere 3.75 MB and took up the space of two large kitchen refrigerators. This tiny Samsung disk drive stores 80 GB. You will need 21,333 IBM 350 disk drives taking up the space of 42,666 refrigerators to have the same amount of storage as this Samsung disk drive. The 350's cabinet is 60 inches (152 cm) long, 68 inches (172 cm) high and 29 inches (74 cm) wide taking up 12.083 square feet. 21,333 IBM 350 cabinets would take up 257,775 square feet or 5.37 football fields. The IBM 350 disk drive costed $3,200 per month to lease in 1956 or $31,418.12 in 2021. 21,333 IBM 350s would cost $68,265,600 per month to lease in 1956 or $670,242,703.76 in 2021.
iPod drives are the smallest drives Ive seen. There are also microdrives, but I have not seen them
If only you had your hands on a 5.25” hd I remember working on a 286 and it only had 10mb of storage. Later I had a 386 with a 3” hd with 100mb and I was really surprised in the leap of technology. Even the 286 ram was a whole card compare to the 386 mini memory stick. It’s amazing to see how far computer technology has gone. But to today’s standards personal computers haven’t changed alote the last decade, they have hit nords law. They are just more energy efficient.
DUDE I CLICKED ON THIS VIDEO AND THE FIRST HARD DRIVE YOU SHOWED I AM LITERALLY HOLDING IN MY HAND RIGHT NOW ARE YOU A PSYCHIC OR SOMETHING
"You gotta use a lot of force to get this zero-insertion-force connector in."
Nope. If you have to use any noticeable amount of force then either that's not a ZIF socket or you're doing it wrong. ZIF sockets have a locking lever that you snap down after plugging the cable (in this case, or chip, such as a CPU, in other cases) in and that's what keeps the cable tight.
This one is not so zero :)
@@JanusCycle: Right, so it's not a ZIF socket like you called it. Unless it really does have a little sliding or swinging lock mechanism and you didn't notice it, and you were trying to plug the FFC into it while it was locked.
The drives were intentionally designed to be the size of a MMC card to maximize compatibility with current designs. Obviously that's only in 2 dimensions, they were way fatter.
That was fascinating. Maybe the Ancient Aliens guy is right. How was humanity able to make something like this without a bit of help? And this is old tech too; we've moved on to solid states, which I know "how" it works, but I couldn't begin to tell you "why" it works.
This was a very enjoyable video. Thank you for making it.
1:25 Sony's DCR - SR line of camcorders also uses this type of drive