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</ref> and manufacturers other than [[IBM]] up to 2003 and [[Hitachi, Ltd.|Hitachi]] after do not officially refer to these drives as Microdrives. Some other companies such as [[Sony]] have licensed the name and sell re-branded versions, others such as [[Seagate Technology|Seagate]] have their own designs which fit in the same form factor. [[Image:Microdrive-HDD-crop-front.jpg|thumb|200px|Front view of a Seagate brand Microdrive. This particular device was removed from an Apple iPod mini, and is intended only for embedded use.]][[Image:Microdrive-HDD-crop-rear.jpg|thumb|200px|Same Seagate device, however, rear view. Note the Apple Inc. logo on the lower left side of the label. See this [[:file:Ipod_mini_drive.jpg|image]] of a iPod mini with Microdrive intact.]]
These drives fit into any [[CompactFlash II]] slot; however, they may consume more power than [[flash memory]] (currents on the order of 190 mA, peak 310 mA, at 3.3 V) and therefore may not work in some low-power devices (e.g., handheld computers). Nevertheless, they have some benefits over flash memory in terms of the way data is stored and manipulated. <!-- such as? --> Microdrives can store 8 [[gigabyte|GB]] or more, but must be [[Disk formatting|formatted]] for a [[file system]] which supports this capacity, such as [[ext3]] or [[NTFS]] or [[FAT32]] which might not be supported by older [[CompactFlash]] hosts. To avoid this problem, the operating system may partition a drive so that each filesystem is smaller than 4GB.
As of 2011, Microdrives are increasingly being viewed as obsolete, having been eclipsed by solid-state flash media in read/write performance, storage capacity, durability, physical size, and price.
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