> The microdrive's timer consequently seems to be 5 or 10 _seconds_...!
> [...]

I haven't noticed any such issues with my z50.  Noise - I have to put
my ear within an inch or so of the microdrive to tell whether it's
spinning by noise.  Shock safety - it's quite rare that the thing is
running when it's other than on my lap or on some kind of stable
support like a table, but of course all it takes is once.  Access
latency - now that's the one I notice, though I'm not noticing the
kinds of problems you describe, like generating false autorepreat from
the lockup; the sort of thing I notice more is stuff like typing ls and
getting very slow response the first time.  It actually feels like
stuff getting swapped out, and for all I know it may actually be; I've
worked with low-RAM machines enough that I know what it feels like for
the shell to get paged out whenever it's idle for longer than a handful
of seconds.

The thing I notice most is that, when I'm hitting the disk hard (eg,
building a kernel), it gets hot.  It gets warm enough when touching the
case outside the CF bay that I wonder if I should be worrying about the
disk itself....

/~\ The ASCII				der Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
 X  Against HTML	       mouse@rodents.montreal.qc.ca
/ \ Email!	     7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39  4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B