Tuesday, October 27, 2009

USB to SD Card Adapter - The Geek Swiss Army Knife of Computer

It's hard to believe that I can get so excited about a tiny SD card to USB adapter, but it's true. I love this little chunk of plastic.

Instead of carrying around a regular USB thumb drive, I've gone to carry around one of these adapters with an 4Gig SD card in it. Combine this with the fact that my camera takes SD cards, and you can appreciate why this device is so handy. Consider:

  • It's dirt cheap - costing about $3.00. I just lost the cap for mine, and bought two more to replace it.
  • It's tiny and durable, so I can carry it in my pocket without worry
  • It works great as replacement for the camera cable that inevitably I don't have with me when I want to transfer photos
  • I can pop the SD card out of that I normally use as a thumb drive, and use it as a backup to my camera's SD card, should it fail or fill up.
  • It's extensible - I can swap in a new, larger, SD card whenever I, effectively making it a larger thumb drive

Why can't all computer hardware be this simple and versatile?

6 comments:

  1. I love my USB SD card adapter. I've got two one that came with my Kingston card, that works like crap and only with kingston cards, and a cheap one looks roughly like the one in the picture which I think I picked up for $3 including shipping... that little cheap piece of plastic is amazingly useful. But now, both my desktop and netbook both have built-in sd card readers so I don't use my usb adapter much anymore but I still carry it around when I travel.

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  2. Funny, I bought one of those adapters and it didn't work. The Kingston that I replaced it with worked fine though and it was with some 3rd tier memory card vendor.

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  3. Nick - I'm glad I'm not the only one who marvels at how useful this bad boy is.

    Grant - sounds you got a dud, what a pain. Yeah, quality wise the cheap ones are, well, cheap.

    My main point wasn't that these particular models are so good, but that the concept of using a SD card adapter over a thumb drive is a winner.

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  4. Can't believe I didn't think to look for this gem earlier! I've been thinking about getting a PCMCIA card to read SDs...but this is so much better.

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  5. Steve - glad this was a useful tip!

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  6. rickard10:50 AM

    I cant get this to work in Windows 7 32 bit or Windows 7 64 bit eather. Why? cOULD ANYONE HELP ME. I have a HP Pavilion A6009n rickard1968@hotmail.com

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