The concept isn't new. Some people have been cutting out micro-sd card adapters and jerry-rigging flush mounts.
Today, I got myself a poor man's version of the nifty mini drive. It is simply called the MiniDrive. They can be found on Amazon. The Nifty minidrive comes in assorted colors and indentation for a paper clip to eject the adapter. Mine is a cheap piece of plastic with another cheap piece of tape that allows you to pull and eject the adapter.
Compared to a normal micro-sdhc sdcard adapter.
As you can see, a regular sdcard sticks way out of the chassis on a Macbook.
With this minidrive adapter, I now have an extra 64GB of storage. In fact, you can use the sdcard as a boot partition. Apple hardware boots off SD media without fuss. I now have Ubuntu 12.10 boots off microsd on a Macbook!
Nice post, I was wondering how the cheap version of the minidrive looked like for a real person. Thank You for the information and also the cheap minidrive has a new version now too without the tape.
ReplyDeletehttp://amzn.com/B00BCBKYMA
Hey, any chance you can post the drive read/write speeds you're seeing?
ReplyDeleteThat would be totally dependent on the card and whatever filesystem you use (exFAT/FAT32). I played it with a while back and didn't notice any difference compared to a standard sdcard reader. E.G. a Samsung 32GB Class 10 gave me 10 MB write/20 MB reads. A UH-S1 Sandisk Ultra 32GB gave me 12 MB writes and 45 MB reads which is the advertise speed of the card.I could never get any good writes on whatever card I used.
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