Microdrives

Microdrives are tiny hard disks—about 25 mm (1") wide—packaged with a CompactFlash Type II form factor and interface. They were developed and released in 1999 by IBM in a 170 megabyte capacity. The division was then sold to Hitachi in December 2002 along with the Microdrive trademark. There are now other brands that sell Microdrives (such as Seagate, Sony, etc), and, over the years, these have become available in increasingly larger capacities (up to 8 GB as of August 2007).

While these drives fit into any CF II slot, they take more power on average (500 mA maximum) than flash memory (100 mA maximum) and so may not work in some low-power devices (for example, NEC HPCs). Being a mechanical device they are more sensitive to physical shock and temperature changes than flash memory.

The popular iPod mini and the Rio Carbon is a device which uses a compact Microdrive to store music.