New Flash Card Reader
This weekend I went to a local computer show and picked up two small flash card readers. Although I needed something in between a CD burner and a floppy disk to bring home my code, pictures, mp3s, etc. So I picked up a 6 in 1 USB card reader made by http://www.dazzle.com and I am very impressed. I also picked up a 128mb CompactFlash card made by http://www.crucial.com/ (known for their high quality memory) as a sort of test. I went home and simply plugged it into the USB slot on the front of my machine and Windows 2000 automatically installed the correct drivers. I then copied a few large files, wiped it and then copied a large number of small xml files and both copies went very quickly, a few seconds max. It's pretty small and very light so I can carry it around with me. It also supports 6 different card formats: CompactFlash, SmartMedia, SecureDigital, MemoryStick, MultiMediaCard, and IBM MicroDrives. The media is relatively cheap, currently around 50 cents/MB but some of the larger cards are still expensive, a 1GB CompactFlash card is around $280 US. They are pretty small too, the CompactFlash 128 mb card I bought is about the size of a half dollar but square.