By Alice Hill
RealTechNews
I have a collection of USB flash drives that seems to grow each day. The same is true with SD memory cards. Today I found a great product called the Bonsai drive that marries the two and allows you to add SD flash cards to a USB drive for limitless expansion. Best of all, no cable required or annoying memory card reader to haul around, and it’s $9.
Pros
1) It is infinitely upgradeable
2) It can be used to rapidly copy photos/files from a camera, phone, mp3 player, or other flash device that uses an SD/MMC card, meaning that you don’t have to travel with those pain-in-the-neck cables.
3) It’s cheap: less then . Use a card you already have.
I keep one SD card in the Banzai, and one in my camera. This way I always have a USB drive for my files, a spare card for my camera, and a way to get my photos onto a computer, at all times. (made by another company), if SD/MMC doesn’t work for you. Obviously, though, that one was a bit bigger. Source:
Our Take: We covered a device yesterday that but it’s costly and requires a power adapter and USB connector. The Bonsai is an elegant way to go if you use SD cards.
Well, welcome to the club. I have been using one of these for years. It’s the best thing since sliced bread!
I’ve been using a Lexar JumpDrive Trio for over a year now and really enjoy it. It makes tranfering of photos from my camera a snap.
Quick question, will this thing boot on a PC equipped to boot USB devices? Or is strictly a READER ONLY ??
I’ve run into a few cheapy USB drives that just won’t boot.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing as Paul. I’ve been using a JumpDrive Trio for years already …
Rootman, the Bonsai drive is just an USB/SD CARD interface. If your SD card is read/write the Bonsai is read/write. I have been reading/writing to my SD card ever since I got the Bonsai. In fact, I run programs from it as well (Portable Firefox, Portable Thunderbird, etc).
You say it’s infinately expandable…Maybe someone can answer a question that’s been bugging me. Why is it that the hand held devices max out at some pathetic amount of SD or Compact Flash(CF) ? I see the perfect paltop, but it only supports 1 GB CF cards. The new Personal Media Centers (PMCs) often have 128 MB of RAM, and a CF or SD slot that only takes 1 GB.
I’ve burned a couple of hours reading the SD card standards association documents, but don’t have the background to sort them out. Also, the PDFs I download seem to be out of date even compared to the new SD card that Fry’s carries.
I recall the same thing happening with hard disks in BIOS for a decade before those engineers got a clue. I had to upgrade 3 mother boards just to take bigger hard disks, one after the other from 1990 to 2000.
The same thing happened with IP v4 (23 bit addresses,) and they had the good sense to move to IP v6 addresses (128 bit addresses, I think.)
Why can’t the standards people get their act togeather long enough to standardize 64 bit (4+ trillion gigabytes) addresses once, and then just leave it? Sending a 64 bit address is trivial at today’s data rates.
Is it built-in-obselecense by the handheld device makers?
Andy Out!
Question: I need to re-install the driver/software for the Bonzai flash drive, but I get a window that says I have to uninstall the first install. I couldn’t find an uninstall anywhere for this thing, and it’s not in the “Add/Remove Software” in Control Panel. How can I uninstall?