Wednesday, January 30, 2013

Poor man's nifty minidrive

Nifty MiniDrive made a big splash on Kickstarter; raising some cash and excitement for their flushed micro-sd adapter. These adapters allow you to use micro-sd cards flushed against the side of a Macbook or Macbook Air.



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!




3 comments:

  1. 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.

    http://amzn.com/B00BCBKYMA

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  2. Hey, any chance you can post the drive read/write speeds you're seeing?

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    1. That 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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