GS Magicstor was a big company till a few years ago. If my memory serves me correctly , Hitachi sued them into oblivion due to GS Magicstor violating Hitachi patents... This was during the time Apple was using microdrives in ipods. Apple started to use them, and Hitachi caught wind and started lawsuits pronto. For apple to use them, they have to be somewhat reliable. They are better then a hitachi drive, almost as good as a seagate reliability wise, and a little faster to boot. The downside is, they are a tad bigger and wont fit in most CF devices based on CFII. And they take more power as well (think 40-50ma vs 30ma), plus dont take as kindly to a drop... ( try dropping a laptop/desktop drive on the floor, these are 10x if not more likely to survive such a fall...)
On the other hand, the usb enclosure models seem to be true ata-ide drives. So its kinda a tossup between these and seagates tbh. My money be on the seagate lasting longer, but not by much. Either way tons of thin clients among other devices take microdrives. I know of a few that been running over 5 years now without a drive replacement! ( wyse terminals ), although those are older revision drives. From what I understand these higher capacity drives are built even better then the 1-2gb generation. :D
I even use an IBM 340mb microdrive in my xt 5162. ^_^ I love microdrives... feel free to ask any more questions, if I can help, more then happy too :D
This weekend I will be converting my dell 486 to a 586 133 w/ a 64 mb isa ide raid controller. I am going to try 1-2-4 drive configs and see what numbers I pull and go from there. Most likely I will post a thread showing results of 2 GS magicstors vs 2 Seagates as well. I even have a 2nd caching controller that supports 64mb as well, so I might even bench them against one another, who knows! One is a CSC Fastcache64 Isa, other is a Buslogic 510a.
Funny thing is, the Fastcache claims in the manual it works in an XT (8 bit slot) . I'll have to try that some day...