Hi Folks. I thought I would also contribute my own review of The Mini Drive.
It's available on ebay.com and amazon.com, for $30.
My test machine was a 2011 13" Macbook Air i7
The packaging:
It's worth mentioning that their packaging is actually pretty nice. No ripping, tearing, or cutting required, it just opens and there's the product. Nice. My weak and fragile nerd fingers thank them.
The Mini Drive itself:
What you see is what you get. It seems to be a pin-to-pin adapter, so basically it's a simple shell that allows a microSD card to fit inside, and offers a nice looking flush fit into the MBA (their site claims it fits equally nice into other apple laptops). It comes with a bendy red wire for extracting, but it seems anything from a paperclip to a ballpoint pen would work as well at taking it out. I put it in and took it our numerous times, and it worked the right the first time every time. The manual claims sometimes you might need to reinsert if something doesn't work, but this did not happen once to me yet.
Appearance:
It fits easily into the MBA, and sits nice and flush as promised. No amount of shaking got it loose, it sat in there snug. The color is not a perfect match to the aluminum, but it's close enough. As promised, it is exactly flush with the MBA, does not protrude a single mm. Despite the color, I think it actually looks quite nice. It's certainly very elegant.
Performance:
It is recognized as a USB drive just as any SD card would be, and is therefore probably limited to USB speeds. Otherwise, as it's a pin-to-pin connection, the speed will depend on what microSD card you choose. My MBA was able to sleep with it in there; it's worth noting that I have hibernate disabled on purpose so I did not test that. Thus, I will not report speed tests because the particular microSD card I am using is not particularly fast to begin with. I am using it for storing my iTunes library, nothing that needs thrillingly fast speeds. I did not personally notice a hit on my battery life at all. Of all upgrades, this one is probably the easiest to use / implement.
Conclusion:
This is great solution for users who (1) want to expand their storage in the MBA, (2) want to do so in the most cost-effective way possible, (3) do not want to carry bulky external drives, and (4) want the solution to be visually pleasing. It does have a few draw backs that come with putting a lot of faith in a microSD card. Considering that for a total of ~$50, you could add a whole 32GB for storage of large stuff like music is a pretty good value. I would recommend this to a friend.
In the future, I plan on getting the fastest microSD card I can and seeing if I can install a bootcamp Windows 7 onto it.
It's available on ebay.com and amazon.com, for $30.
My test machine was a 2011 13" Macbook Air i7
The packaging:
It's worth mentioning that their packaging is actually pretty nice. No ripping, tearing, or cutting required, it just opens and there's the product. Nice. My weak and fragile nerd fingers thank them.
The Mini Drive itself:
What you see is what you get. It seems to be a pin-to-pin adapter, so basically it's a simple shell that allows a microSD card to fit inside, and offers a nice looking flush fit into the MBA (their site claims it fits equally nice into other apple laptops). It comes with a bendy red wire for extracting, but it seems anything from a paperclip to a ballpoint pen would work as well at taking it out. I put it in and took it our numerous times, and it worked the right the first time every time. The manual claims sometimes you might need to reinsert if something doesn't work, but this did not happen once to me yet.
Appearance:
It fits easily into the MBA, and sits nice and flush as promised. No amount of shaking got it loose, it sat in there snug. The color is not a perfect match to the aluminum, but it's close enough. As promised, it is exactly flush with the MBA, does not protrude a single mm. Despite the color, I think it actually looks quite nice. It's certainly very elegant.
Performance:
It is recognized as a USB drive just as any SD card would be, and is therefore probably limited to USB speeds. Otherwise, as it's a pin-to-pin connection, the speed will depend on what microSD card you choose. My MBA was able to sleep with it in there; it's worth noting that I have hibernate disabled on purpose so I did not test that. Thus, I will not report speed tests because the particular microSD card I am using is not particularly fast to begin with. I am using it for storing my iTunes library, nothing that needs thrillingly fast speeds. I did not personally notice a hit on my battery life at all. Of all upgrades, this one is probably the easiest to use / implement.
Conclusion:
This is great solution for users who (1) want to expand their storage in the MBA, (2) want to do so in the most cost-effective way possible, (3) do not want to carry bulky external drives, and (4) want the solution to be visually pleasing. It does have a few draw backs that come with putting a lot of faith in a microSD card. Considering that for a total of ~$50, you could add a whole 32GB for storage of large stuff like music is a pretty good value. I would recommend this to a friend.
In the future, I plan on getting the fastest microSD card I can and seeing if I can install a bootcamp Windows 7 onto it.