What's the safest way to expand storage on my MBA? I just bought a 32gb sandisk cruzer and it looks great, but it's slow (which I don't mind too much) and Amazon has a ton of 1-star reviews from users who've had issues with the drive suddenly failing. Would it be safer to get one of those Elago adapters or wait for a nifty minidrive when it becomes available?
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Safest Option: USB Flash Drive or microSD with Adapter?
- Thread starter Kelped
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I typical USB flash drive will hang out, you could get the Sandisk Cruzer Fit (looks like a Logitech USB unifying receiver), but that would take up a USB port.
I would opt for either the Nifty Mini-drive or this one you can get on ebay:
http://theminidrive.com/TheMiniDrive.com/Specs.html
IIRC the Nifty Mini-drive is still in development.
http://theniftyminidrive.com/
If by safest you mean most reliable, no drive is more reliable than the other (not considering brand). The USB will hang out, which is pretty annoying if you plan to have it in all the time. I would go for a NiftyDrive when it becomes available; it is convenient and some SanDisk SD cards have a 5 year warantee.
The Nifty was shipped to the early kickstarter supporters a couple of months ago already.
It indeed absolutely is nifty.
I use it with a Sandisk 64 GB SDXC micro-SD and it works well enough for data that you don't need that much but would like to keep accessible all the time (it reads at 34 MB/s, much slower than the main SSD, but quite usable).
I have corestorage encrypted my drive just as I have Filevault 2 on the main SSD.
Keeping good backups is a must, of course, as always.
Yes, those (micro-)SD cards can and do fail.