No more $200 4GB MicroDrives for you

Background
Back on January, Creative Labs released a small MP3 player, MuVo², which used a Hitachi 4GB Type II CF MicroDrive (model: HMS360404D5CF00, P/N 13G1766, made in Thailand - official product page), the same drive the iPod Mini uses.

The player’s cost? $200. The drive’s cost? $450 (it even goes to $500).

Wait, something’s going on here
It didn’t take long for hackers to take notice, extract the drive from the MuVo² (note: Apple, being the smart guys they are, have modded the iPod Mini’s drive, so it has no use outside of the player - more on that in a minute), and either use it as a storage medium for their digital cameras, or —even better— sell it on eBay.

To make the things even better (for the consumer, of course), even the MuVo²’s empty shells could go on auction (going around ~$40), since they could still work as MP3 players, if you had a Compact Flash memory card to spare (note: as the documentation shows, not all memory card brands/models work).

The whole process of extracting the drive got documented quite extensibly online, with guides full of pictures and step-by-step instructions. Here are a few pointers:

• MuVo² MicroDrive Extraction — andymack.com (January 08, 2004)
• MuVo² Reborn - Inserting Another MicroDrive — andymack.com (January 28, 2004)
• MuVo 4GB drive/CF Swap and Screws — dpreview.com forums (January 29, 2004)
• Muvo² 4GB Hard Drive Extraction - PCconsultant.com
• Hitachi MicroDrive Removal: Creative Nomad MuVo² — studio2f.com (March 22, 2004)

With all that information available, word spread quite fast and MuVo² stocks disappearead even faster. New stocks would arrive, only to go away within minutes.

Fast forward to today
Creative Labs probably took notice right away, but didn’t take any immediate action; maybe because it boosted their player’s sales, beyond their wildest imagination. But now, 6 months later, and —I’m just guessing here, but it’s a good guess— after some big pressure from Hitachi’s part (after all, it was their $450 4GB MicroDrive sales’ numbers that were going down), the MuVo² version 2.0 is about to be released.

What’s the one big “feature” of version 2.0?
You guessed it right. The drive “is not removable and will not function in MicroDrive or Compact Flash devices”, as the Amazon product page notes. Despite, that very clear note (“Please note”, in bold) and the “version 2.0” addendum in the product’s name, it’s still #1 in the Eary Adopter Audio & Video” Amazon category.

People apparently think they’re going to get a product identical to “version 1”, which is out of stock, of course…

We should have seen it coming though. After all, there was this very informative comment three months ago, over at studio2f.com predicting this and explaining how it’s going to be implemented. This particular comment is also useful in understanding why it’s so much difficult to make the MicroDrive inside the iPod Mini work normally outside of it. Refer to this page and skip to the comment posted on “February 26, 2004 — 11:55AM”. Some minor editing (capitalisation, spelling, etc.) aside, here it is, copied and pasted for your convenience:

Folks, I talked with the Hitachi senior apps engineer and it will NOT work and was expressly designed as such. CF cards support 3 interface modes: Memory, I/O and IDE.

The iPod drives are stuck in IDE mode and most cameras expect Memory or I/O mode. It’s part of the CF standard for the host to command the CF card what mode to go into at power on, but it appears that the iPod MicroDrive ignores this command, or at least my Digital Rebel does not issue the command.

I tried both putting the MicroDrive in my Rebel and copying the partiton map, firmware and mountable partitions of the iPod onto my 1GB Flash and putting that in the iPod Mini. Neither worked.

It may still be possible to put a Flash card in the iPod Mini though, Apple may have not connected the pin that would command the Flash card to go into IDE mode.

He claims that soon Creative will be using these “special” MicroDrives so the Muvo² hack will be disappearing as well.

√ Jun 5th, 2004