Hasta La Gadget!

These CF/SD card adapters are either brilliant or bafflingly bad. The trouble is, we’re not sure which. The widgets let you take SD cards and use them in cameras which usually only accept the larger Compact Flash cards.

This could be useful, we guess, if you happen to have a lot of SD cards lying around. But we wonder if you’d want to. Neither of the two basic adapters (one for SD and one for microSD) lists read/write speeds, and in DSLRs, which can dump a lot of data very fast, speed is arguably the most important spec on the sheet. Also, instead of buying adapters and incorrect cards, why not just buy the right shape card to begin with?

More interesting is the four-card RAID adapter, a CF body with slots for four microSD cards. If all the cards are of the same size, they will be turned into a RAID array, allowing very fast speeds – up to 80MB/s read and 40MB/s write. This sounds great until you realize that this appears to be RAID 0 aka “Scary RAID”, which means that if one card fails you lose everything, and that a regular Sandisk Extreme IV will write at the same speed.

Not that we’re big CF fans. The rows of pins inside my DSLR make me nervous every time I push the card back in. But this doesn’t seem to be much more than a gimmick.

The SD adapter is $26, the microSD $31, and the scary microSD RAID array will be available in July.

Product page [Photofast via Oh Gizmo!]

More loyal readers (read: those willing to sit through a video featuring me) might remember a spot we did on turning an old floppy disk into a USB drive. The results were disastrous, involving splintered plastic, a non-functioning USB stick and a lot of embarrassment.

The picture above shows what we were trying to make, only done properly. Unfortunately, a solid quarter-hour of Googling hasn’t turned up the manufacturer. Normally this would mean we’d skip the post here on Gadget Lab, but this time we’re making an exception, so very cool is the object in question. I’d buy one in an instant. The only caveat is that it needs to have more than 1.44MB storage. Anyone know where I can get one?

A volta do Disquete [Guaraná Rosa via Book of Joe]

See Also:

• Gadget Lab Video: USB Thumb Drive Hacking Disaster
• Make Your Own USB Stick – Video – Wired
• Floppy Disk Retrofitted as USB Drive

How do you decide on an external 3.5″ hard drive? What’s inside the box doesn’t really matter — anything made by Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, Toshiba or Samsung will work the same (exceptions are the high-performance drives with extra cache or 10,ooo RPM speeds). So the decision rests on a balance between price and looks. And now, on knobs.

Samsung has released the oddly named Story (a terrible pun on “store”, we imagine) and it ticks the style and value boxes. 1TB wil cost £83 ($137), and the box is a smart-looking mix of brushed metal and matt-black plastic reminiscent of early 1990s stereo equipment. But one look will tell you that Samsung has pushed the design-dial up yo 11: There’s a knob on the front.

What does it do? It acts primarily as an on/off switch, but once you have decided on which side of that binary choice to stand, you can tweak it further. Twisting the knob will change the brightness of the drive’s power light. Useless? Perhaps, although being able to turn the thing down might make it easier to sleep at night: I have a pretty modest range of hardware in my bedroom and I still have to make a tour at night covering the blinkenlights with my discarded underwear. Hopefully Samsung will still be making these when ZFS becomes a widespread file system, allowing us to make a pun-tastic nerd-titled post “Never Ending Story”.

The Story is also stackable, USB-only and comes in both 1 and 1.5TB sizes.

Product page [Samsung via Reg Hardware]

Remember how awesome Rocky III was the first time you saw it? Come on, we know you were pumping your fist along to Survivor, you don’t have to be shy about it now. Well, you can relive the well-toned glory that is Apollo Creed, Rocky Balboa, and Clubber Lang in flash drive format, for only ¥2,850 (about $30) — essentially a steal. Wait, where’s Thunderlips?

Via Geeky Gadgets

Filed under: Storage

Rocky III USB drives sadly missing Burgess Meredith version originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What a difference six months makes. Back before Christmas, one of the VPs at Western Digital was saying that the company only “enters markets that exist,” meaning, of course, that we had to take all the tales of SSDs that we heard (in product spec sheets and reviews) on faith alone. Since then the company’s acquired SiliconSystems and — a short trip down the road to Damascus later — it’s announcing the SiliconDrive III product range. SiliconSystems’ meat and potatoes were heavy hitters in such industries as communications, aerospace, and military, and it seems that WD’s new range will continue to target these markets. According to The Register, the range sports SiSMART (which keeps tabs on the drive’s status in real-time, notifying the user when it needs to be replaced) and includes 2.5-inch (SATA and PATA) and 1.8-inch Micro SATA devices, featuring native SATA 3Gb/s or ATA-7 interfaces with up to 100MB/s read speeds write speeds up to 80MB/s. Max available capacity is 120GB. No word yet on specific products or prices, but you’ll know as soon as we do.

Filed under: Storage

Western Digital recants, announces its SiliconDrive III range of SSDs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Jun 2009 09:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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