Macbook Air/Retina Storage Upgrade

Thoughts on this as an alternative to the Nifty mini Drive?
Micro SD Adapter Retina Macbook Air Nifty Drive Alternative 64 GB | eBay

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So it's a microSD card holder that plugs into the SD slot. What am I missing here?

Well it would mean I could increase the storage on my MBA and it would be invisible.

Well yeah..an SD card would indeed give you extra storage..while not invisible, you could also use a external HD as well..

Not really sure what you are expecting as far as "thoughts" go..and I'm just a little confused by why there needs to be any special adapter for this. I imagine the MBA has a standard SD slot. Any mini/microSD card bought these days comes with the adapter to put it into so that it can be plugged into the SD slot.

Having a LOT of experience with mini/microSD cards, I would actually strongly recommend sticking with the regular SD cards due to their superior flash and ability to survive for a longer period that any microSD would..

Sure, I just love the idea of having extra storage thats 'hidden' in the laptop

Good enough..the latest MBA does have a SDXC slot that should support SD cards significantly larger than the SDHC slot which is limited to 32GB. SDXC can support up to 2TB..

This is actually something I never thought about.

Any drawbacks to using a SDXC card instead of external storage? Do they wear out faster or anything like that?

Depends on what the external storage is. If it's a HD then it might tend to be more reliable in the long run than the SD card.

On the SD card front, the regular SD-sized cards offer the best NAND Flash technology that's fairly resilient while the microSD's provide the least resilient version. These things fail like crazy and I would definitely not rely on them as a means of backing up important data.

To that extent, I would avoid using the SD card as a long term backup means as well. As a temporary way of getting say 128GB more of space as to not use up the MBA's internal storage is one thing, but knowing that you'll transfer that data to something more stable like an external HD or NAS or something..

Yeah, I was just referring to expanding storage space for something like the MBA which is limited and difficult/expensive to upgrade.

Yeah that would work quite well as long one understands the fragility of Flash devices..

I've got a lot of experience working with flash devices and one of the things about these part is that they have a finite life as far as erase/write cycles are concerned..there are (as expected) no limits on reads..

To alleviate these issues with having one area of the Flash degrading faster than the other is a technique known as wear leveling. In most cases this is a software function at the lowest level of the OS whereby you keep moving data to all areas of the Flash as opposed to one area more than other. This ensures that the entire flash part will degrade the same and give it the real theoretical life it's supposed to have..

With these MBA's and SSDs, that wear leveling and related work has been moved into either the controller or the drive itself. So these devices automatically write to different parts of the flash media to ensure even wear..

This, however, is not what happens with SD cards..so you could end up degrading the part faster than usual if you erase/write the same file over and over again and so on..

The problem is that once a part degrades, the failure scenario is technically defined as "unknown".. You can talk to any of the Flash manufacturers, Samsung, Atmel and so on and they'll just say we have no idea how it's going to behave..some just slow down and take forever to do anything, some fail in catastrophic ways where basically you lose all of your data in one shot..