IBM has taken promotion of its 1G Microdrive to a truly global level, announcing the drive's successful participation in two NASA shuttle missions. IBM is heralding the Microdrive's ability to operate in the rigours of space as a compelling testimonial for storage consumers.
Astronauts manning the Atlantis and Discovery shuttles used the stamp-sized drive to capture and store hundreds of high-quality images documenting their missions, and return them to earth safely.
"If the Microdrive can be trusted to help capture NASA's history making journeys, imagine what it can do to preserve your child's first smile or your business critical documents" said Micheal Kuptz, of IBM's storage technology division.
Home consumers and business travellers can now take some comfort in the knowledge that the next time they plan a trip to Mars, or some of the more radiation saturated regions of the Crab nebula, there's a portable storage solution for them.
The missions revealed that the Microdrive could withstand a series of environmental hazards common in space, including high doses of radiation and weightlessness, without data loss. However, the scope of the mission could not indicate to observers how the drive might perform in more extreme environments physicists predict exist further from earth such as black holes and super-novas.
The 1G Microdrive, which retails for AU$989 has a footprint of just 2.5 square centimetres but currently holds nearly 16 times the capacity of comparable micro-storage device, the 64M Secure Digital (SD) memory card. A 256M version of the SD memory card is expected soon.
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