English edit

 
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Sinclair ZX Microdrive unit from the 1980s

Etymology edit

micro- +‎ drive. In the sense of "miniature hard disk", originally a trademark.

Pronunciation edit

  • (file)

Noun edit

microdrive (plural microdrives)

  1. (computing) A miniature hard disk.
    • 2011, Geoff Varrall, Making Telecoms Work:
      One-inch disks typically held about 8 to 10 GB and microdrives were either 2 or 4 GB.
  2. (computing, historical) An early computer storage system using cartridges of looped tape.
    • 1984, Alison Maguire, interviewed in SINCLAIR talks... (in Crash magazine, issue 3, April 1984) [1]
      There are lots of things that will benefit from being on a microdrive cartridge but if you release something on microdrive you're only going to sell it to people with microdrive.
    • 1986, African Energy Programme (Commonwealth Science Council), Renewable energy development in Africa (volume 2, page 161)
      The Spectrum has its own inexpensive mass storage unit - the microdrive which starts at about £150 for 100k of storage, but this may not be suitable in all cases, since the storage unit may be damaged if turned on with the disc in position.
    • 1989 June, Phil South, “Rage Hard”, in Your Sinclair[2], archived from the original on 10 March 2012:
      Disk interfaces have been around since the year dot, as people soon realised that the microdrive was unreliable, unstable and generally rubbish for the storage of anything, useless except as a rather small beermat.
  3. A device for inserting microelectrodes into the brain.
    • 2014, Masami Tatsuno, Analysis and Modeling of Coordinated Multi-neuronal Activity, page 23:
      The microdrive was invented so that electrodes could be lowered into the brain in order to isolate new neurons.

See also edit