microdrive

Noun

1. A miniature hard disk.
   • One-inch disks typically held about 8 to 10 GB and microdrives were either 2 or 4 GB. - 2011, Geoff Varrall, Making Telecoms Work:
2. An early computer storage system using cartridges of looped tape.
   • 1984, Alison Maguire, interviewed in SINCLAIR talks... (in Crash magazine, issue 3, April 1984) http://www.crashonline.org.uk/03/sinclair.htm There are lots of things that will benefit from being on a microdrive...
   • 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...
   • 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.
   • The microdrive was invented so that electrodes could be lowered into the brain in order to isolate new neurons. - 2014, Masami Tatsuno, Analysis and Modeling of Coordinated Multi-neuronal Activity, page 23: