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Creative Uses For The SD Card Slot

groove-agent

groove-agent

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jan 13, 2006
2,087
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I'm still trying to decide whether or not to give up my expresscard slot for an SD card slot. If I could figure out something useful to do with it, that would persuade me. I don't do hard core photography yet, and if I did, I could always just USB the camera.

Does anyone use the SD card slot for something other than photography? I figured maybe it could be used like a floppy drive to organize certain projects or files but those could always be backed up to CD/ DVD. Not to mention, if you store the files on your hard drive, time machine would back them up.
 
My guess is that apple will start shipping OS X 10.7 or .8 via SD card, but it's not really a make or break type of thing.
 
zw-gator said:
My guess is that apple will start shipping OS X 10.7 or .8 via SD card, but it's not really a make or break type of thing.
Click to expand...

If anything it would be a USB flash drive, but optical media is so cheap why bother? Maybe they could offer it online some how, but an SD is pretty unlikely.
 
Get a 16GB SDHC card, install OS X and your must-have apps et voila! emergency backup system.

Yes, the SD card slot is bootable.
 
reallynotnick said:
If anything it would be a USB flash drive, but optical media is so cheap why bother? Maybe they could offer it online some how, but an SD is pretty unlikely.
Click to expand...

I see your point, but if Apple does put their OS onto an SD card it could generate a few more sales from people upgrading to macs with SD slots.

Now, before you jump as say you can buy an usb to SD adapter, there will be a lot of people who are simply to stupid to realize this.
 
Shaduu said:
Get a 16GB SDHC card, install OS X and your must-have apps et voila! emergency backup system.

Yes, the SD card slot is bootable.
Click to expand...

Snow Leopard fits easily on an 8GB card. I've already made & used disk copies because some of my opticals won't read my Family Pack disk.:mad:

You could also do the same thing with a USB flash drive.
 
Can someone direct me to a how to load OSX on an SD card. I've always wanted to do something like that ever since I saw a guy at the apple store plug his firewire drive into a computer and load up his OSX on that computer.
 
LazersGoPEWPEW said:
Can someone direct me to a how to load OSX on an SD card. I've always wanted to do something like that ever since I saw a guy at the apple store plug his firewire drive into a computer and load up his OSX on that computer.
Click to expand...

It's not hard, pop the OS X Installation cd in, boot up to it, when it gets to the part about asking which drive to install OS X on, select the SD card, press Install, and when/if you need to boot up to it when you start the computer hold Option and select the SD card, or in OS X go to System Preferences>Startup Disk and select the SD card and reboot.

Done.
 
another sdhc question

I have an older macbook with no card reader. I recently got an 8gb sdhc and purchased a usb thumbdrive adapter to use for portable storage. I used the card in a $100 insignia camcorder first.

Now that I want to use it for a thumbdrive; It has 2 files on it, DCIM and MISC. Can I delete them? Will that make my iphoto not open. That's a pain too. It opens like my card is still a cam. Also another problem is I can't rename my card. It is called untitled. Thanks for any help. Mick

PS I macroogled and this is the best I can do other than making another post. Thanks.
 
iknowyourider said:
I have an older macbook with no card reader. I recently got an 8gb sdhc and purchased a usb thumbdrive adapter to use for portable storage. I used the card in a $100 insignia camcorder first.

Now that I want to use it for a thumbdrive; It has 2 files on it, DCIM and MISC. Can I delete them? Will that make my iphoto not open. That's a pain too. It opens like my card is still a cam. Also another problem is I can't rename my card. It is called untitled. Thanks for any help. Mick

PS I macroogled and this is the best I can do other than making another post. Thanks.
Click to expand...

The DCIM folder is Digital Camera IMages folder. That is where the video files from your Insignia camcorder were stored. If you don't want to use that memory card for anything but storage now, just erase it in Disk Utility. If that DCIM folder is gone that should stop iPhoto from opening, too.
 
has anyone tried using an SD card just for swap memory? In theory, if the SD card can read/write the same speed or faster then hard drive, it could boost performance somewhat for hard drive users?
 
ayeying said:
has anyone tried using an SD card just for swap memory? In theory, if the SD card can read/write the same speed or faster then hard drive, it could boost performance somewhat for hard drive users?
Click to expand...

I was thinking the same thing, would it be faster to boot from an SD card than my 500 gig HD?
 
I have Leopard on an external HDD and I can deal with its slightly less speed. If I wanted a copy of Snow Leopard on an SDHC, would it be still useable as a 'full' computer experience? I use that external HDD between Macs pretty often, so just to have something smaller would be great!
 
ayeying said:
has anyone tried using an SD card just for swap memory? In theory, if the SD card can read/write the same speed or faster then hard drive, it could boost performance somewhat for hard drive users?
Click to expand...

Without wear levelling you may wear out a few MB of the card and then have failures.

Greg
 
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