> > Hi > John > thanks for that overview. > Have you ever dropped such a micro drive without damaging and would you say > that they are reliable? > just wondering > happy Sunday > Markus
I've never dropped one. I try very hard not to drop *any* photographic equipment - lenses like being dropped even less than microdrives do. I'm not shooting RAW for most of my stuff, so I don't need to change drives in the field. When I take the drives out for upload I make sure I'm sitting down, with the camera on a table or some other surface. You need to be more careful with microdrives, anyway; they are thicker than even a CF-II card, and can be tricky to extract from the *ist-D. I've got a special tool in my camera bag that makes this much easier. And I quite often just use the supplied USB cable; I start the upload and then take care of other things (a visit to the bathroom, grab a drink if it's a hot day, check for any urgent email). By the time I want to take a look at the images the upload is completed. If I know there are one or two images I really want to look at immediately I'll upload those ones first, before kicking off the bulk upload. Reliability? Until recently I never saw anything other than microdrives being used by the D1/EOS-1d crowd, and microdrives are still responsible for over 50% of the storage I see in the media room. That's what you get when you rent a digital from most places, too. If the reliability is good enough for those whose livelihood depends on it, it's good enough for me. I've seen far more images lost through human error than through equipment failure.
