Mark's Notebook

I thought of this first

I've been eyeing the USB "thumb/pen/flash/keychain" drives that hold up to about a gig of RAM accessible as a hard disk. We have a Zip drive at home that we've used to back up Mary's old PC and sometimes to transfer files between PC and Mac. But it's a little hassle to pull it down out of the closet once in a long while when we need it. Since the thumb drives hold as much or more than a Zip, it made sense.

What didn't make sense to me is that a year ago you could get 256 MB for $50, now you can get 512 MB for the same price, and a year from now you'll be able to get 1 GB. Why not sell a drive where you can upgrade the memory module yourself?

Well, now they've done just that. I got a 512 MB SD card, Kingston manufacture (one of the best), from Mac Connection for only $44. After the rebate it will be only $31, less than some charge for 256 MB.

I also got something called an XtraDrive from mediaGear. It accepts any size SD or MCC card. It was only $9 at Fry's.

Since our new Canon camera also uses an SD card (we bought a 128 MB card), and so does my Palm Tungsten C, we can play mix-and-match between the camera, the Palm, and the thumb drive. Next year, we'll be able to buy a 1 GB or 2 GB module and have even more fun.

Now, why can't Apple use a strategy like this with the iPod Shuffle?

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Last updated Tuesday 13 May 2008