These devices came in the shape of a hockey puck with an integrated USB 2.0 cable. Seagate launched their 6 GB mini drive on the same day as Hitachi, in February 2005. Western Digital In early 2005 Western Digital announced they would be joining the mini hard drive market with their own drives. These would be available by the second half of 2005 and reach capacities up to 6 GB. Western Digital launched a 6 GB external USB 2.0 microdrive as a part of the Passport Pocket brand in March 2006. This was made as a competitor to the Seagate Pocket Hard Drive. The unit had 2 MB of cache, 11 ms seek, spun at 3,600 RPM, and was 60 × 45 × 9 mm. The price for the unit was $130 upon release. GS Magicstor On July 16, 2003, a Chinese manufacturer called GS Magicstor, Inc. (subsidiary of GS Magic, Inc.) announced it had produced 1-inch hard disk drive with capacity of 2.4GB at the beginning of the year 2003, originally marketed as an alternative to Microdrive by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. It was to be followed by 2.2 and 4.8GB 1-inch HDD that was unveiled in 2004 International CES, with 0.8-inch HDD. On December 28, 2004, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies announced it had filed lawsuit against GS Magicstor, Inc., GS Magic, Inc., and Riospring, Inc. for infringement of multiple Hitachi GST's patents relating to hard disk drives, after GS Magic Inc. had started promoting mini-HDD (small form factor hard disk drive). Discontinuation By 2006, flash-based CompactFlash cards surpassed Microdrives in maximum size and over time became less expensive as well, which rendered the technology obsolete. As of July 2012, there are no known manufacturers of 1-inch form-factor harddisk drives. Hitachi had also stopped production of its trademarked Microdrive product. Microdrive models by timeline Date of release of large sizes. Advantages Until 2006, Microdrives had higher capacity than CompactFlash cards. Microdrives allowed more write cycles, making them suitable for use as swap space in embedded applications. Microdrives were better at handling power loss in the middle of writing. Flash storage always needs to move some old data around while writing, to ensure the flash's finite write life is consumed equally; a bug in the wear levelling algorithm would cause data loss if the card were unplugged at the exact wrong time. Data on rotational disks is modified in place,