Building a Reader for the Smallest Hard Drive

Building a Reader for the World’s Smallest Hard Drive — MK4001MTD

Introduction

Back when flash storage was still very expensive, miniature hard drives offered a much better cost-per-gigabyte ratio. As IBM and later Hitachi produced the well-known 1-inch CompactFlash-form-factor microdrives, followed by Seagate, Western Digital, and GS Magicstor.

From HotChips 13 “Microdrive: High Capacity Storage for the Handheld Revolution, Thomas Albrecht (IBM)” Link:

Rather than competing directly in that same 1-inch space, Toshiba introduced something even smaller: in January 2004, it announced a 0.85-inch hard disk drive, the MK4001MTD.[1]

From HotChips 18 “The Ultra Small HDD for the Mobile Applications, Toshiba” Link:

This drive later appeared in products such as the Nokia N91, where it provided 4 GB of storage in a feature phone.[3] Toshiba’s 0.85-inch HDD was also recognized by Guinness World Records in 2004 as the world’s smallest hard disk drive.[2][5] Not long afterward, flash memory rapidly became cheaper, larger, and more practical, and drives like this disappeared from the market.

From left to right: HP Kittyhawk 1.3” (20MB), Seagate ST1 1” CF (6GB), Cornice 8GB 1” (8GB), Toshiba MK4001MTD 0.85” (4GB), and a M.2 2230 SSD (128G) as size reference

History

Over time, I collected several MK4001MTD drives whenever I came across working or even non-working units. One of my long-term goals was to figure out how to read one myself.

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