worlds smallest thumb drive excellent for mac air

I just got a white Elago nano usb reader. This thing is hot. it takes a micrSD card. The adapter is 9 bucks and its about 60 bucks for a 32 gig microSD card.

enclosed is a blurry shot of it on my air. doesnt stick to far out eh for 32 gigs. I could just leave it there as a spare drive.



here is the adapter at amazon. the sd card fits inside of the silver adapter part so its just a nub.

Amazon.com: ELAGO Nano Mobile Micro SD Reader-World Smallest (EL-RD-012,White): Electronics

( OOps Irrelevant )

Thanks for sharing that. Looks awesome and clean and small and cute and ..... and ..... lol

Thats a cool piece of kit, tiny indeed, been looking for a small thumb drive myself, may just have to purchase one of these!

- Simon

Buzzard2010 said:

Thats a cool piece of kit, tiny indeed, been looking for a small thumb drive myself, may just have to purchase one of these!

- Simon

Click to expand...

I guess I'm a sucker for things like this. I bought one after following the link.

Haha, same here, have bought a couple of things after reading threads here. My cupboard really is full of old (but not useless tech). Can't help myself

- Simon

I have a tiny usb drive. its just a nub that sticks out. it holds 32 gigs so its quite feasible to just leave it there since its so small. unfortunatly im having problems whenever the computer goes to sleep. specifically device not ejected problems.

I did a google search thinking it was my usb thumb drive only to find out this problem is actually well known if you search for it. It happens with all kinds of thumb drives and external sd card mechanisms on macosx. This device ejection problem turns out to be a more common issue then i had hoped. I was happy it wasnt my new thumb drive, but dissapointed i couldnt do what i had hoped.

One site had suggested to turn off powering hard drives in power settings. this did in fact lessen the issue. I thought at first it cured it completely in the end though i got the message again. Once you get the message once the drive is almost unusable. it becomes really unstable and may connect and disconnect at will. until you properly eject then reinsert the drive.

Another site had suggested to turn sleep off and just set it to turn monitor off. i didnt play with this setting because i really dont want to keep the machine running like that all the time even when im sleeping just for a thumb drive.

I know in windows you can actually tell the os that a removable disk is actually a non removable drive. I was wondering if OSX had this feature. Maybe if it thought it was a non removable disk it would give me less trouble.

has anyone actually used a usb drive and sorta been able to have it connected all the time withou issue. any suggestions how to do it.

pics below how small 32 gigs has gotten
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I just wanted to post that leaving in the thumb drive isnt working that well. I actually tested it with over a dozen different types of thumb drives and there is always a ejection error message coming from sleep.

On one hand im happy its not the new thumb drive but on another its disappointing that osx has issues with this. if you search google about leaving a usb device attached to mac osx you will get all kinds of hits about this ejection message. it seems there is a hardware update for some things that stop the message but basic usb devices like thumb drives are sol. I know of no fix for thumb drives that actually works. feel free to pm me if you know of a fix or a patch that makes it work like a regular drive.

safarisurfer said:

I just wanted to post that leaving in the thumb drive isnt working that well. I actually tested it with over a dozen different types of thumb drives and there is always a ejection error message coming from sleep.

On one hand im happy its not the new thumb drive but on another its disappointing that osx has issues with this. if you search google about leaving a usb device attached to mac osx you will get all kinds of hits about this ejection message. it seems there is a hardware update for some things that stop the message but basic usb devices like thumb drives are sol. I know of no fix for thumb drives that actually works. feel free to pm me if you know of a fix or a patch that makes it work like a regular drive.

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My rule of thumb for thumb drives is if you aren't using it eject it. (See what I did there? ) That way it doesn't drain unnecessary power. Secondly I don't like things sticking out the side.

i agree about ejecting. but did you see how far it sticks out from the side, (i posted a pic). its actually feasible to leave it there if you could some how. if i have to eject it all the time it sorta destroys the point of its size.

safarisurfer said:

...has anyone actually used a usb drive and sorta been able to have it connected all the time withou issue.

Click to expand...

As the price of good-sized flash drives has become very reasonable recently, the question of using a flash drive as an external hard drive replacement has been coming up more and more.

Example:
32GB flash drive for $45
32GB Pen Drive (Flash Memory) USB 2.0 (CCH): OEMPCworld.com

I often recommend that clients use flash drives as part of a backup scheme that includes using hard drives for both clone and versioned backups. I suggest that they often also backup just their Documents folder to a flash drive and keep the flash drive on their person at all times as sort of a fail-safe.

But I don't see that flash drives are reliable enough to use as a full-time dedicated external hard drive replacement. I see flash drives fail pretty regularly. Or sometimes they just start to behave oddly. When used as a portable temporary storage medium, that's no big deal. You can just reformat your flash drive using Disk Utility and start over. But you are in for much more inconvenience using a flash drive as an external hard drive substitute.

___________________________________________

Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)

Macintosh OS X Routine Maintenance
OS X Maintenance And Troubleshooting
___________________________________________

I used the same flash drive for three years, although it was beginning to behave erratically after about two years. I stuck with it until I saw how much better a new one worked, and retired the old one rather than maintaining two. I imagine that sudden failure is not beyond the pale. Using two, one as a "clone", would be safer than relying on just one.

Thanks for the feedback. I think you may be right Randy usb thumb drives do seem a bit flaky. often times the larger sizes seem to have mixed to bad reviews that make me wonder if the failure rate is higher with the larger size thumb drives.

I do keep a usb drive on my keychain at all times though.

Note: Merged both your posts together. No need to post about this topic in two different forums.