As I mentioned the other day, I recently picked up a Canon ultra-compact digital camera to use while on the road. What I didn’t mention is that I also grabbed a nifty new accessory for the MacBook Pro: A SanDisk ExpressCard flash media adapter. This little gadget converts a notebook’s ExpressCard slot into a versatile flash media adapter - it takes most versions of SD and Memory Stick, and works in both OS X and Windows without a hiccup (or even a driver install).

Of course, I could just carry around a cable and use the camera as a media reader. But that’s one more tangled item in the rat’s nest for airport security to flag. Besides, that ExpressCard slot was just sitting there doing nothing - what’s a geek to do?

ExpressCard is a really weird technology, by the way. It’s actually two slots in one, from both a physical and electrical perspective. Physically, there are two different card sizes - the slim “34″ type seen here, and a wider (but notched) “54″ version. The MacBook Pro and my Dells have just the narrow ExpressCard/34 version, and most cards are of this type as well. But the weird thing is the electrical connection: ExpressCards can have either a PCI Express or USB connection! So this little card reader is nothing more than a USB card reader built into a tiny metal card. This is why it doesn’t need a driver for most modern OSes, and why it was so cheap. One more thing - unlike PCMCIA/CardBus cards, which are held in by friction, ExpressCard has a nice positive push-and-click engagement in the slot.

The ExpressCard flash media adapter snaps in place and is flush with the edge of the MacBook Pro - very clean!

The stock market was alive with rumors that Seagate might be bought by an unnamed Chinese company, as reported in the New York Times, among others. This comes after a week of insider whispers about a possible tieup between Seagate and memory-makers, Micron or SanDisk, itself a Seagate spin-off. It seems that the hot disk drive and flash memory markets are shaking as sales heat up and margins thin out. Note that this is far from a done-deal. Rather, Seagate CEO, William Watkins, was merely noting in an interview that there was such an inquiry.

To my eyes, a Seagate buy-out would be little different from the sale of IBM’s disk drive operations to Hitachi back in 2002 or their sale of the PC group to Lenovo two years later. Seagate is a component maker, and although it is a critical piece of the storage industry it is not really a strategic entity. Certainly, the company’s contributions to standards like SATA, SAS, and (yes) hybrid drives are worthwhile, but apart from evault, the company contributes little to the value-added services landscape.

Still, if a buy-out softened scrappy Seagate I would miss the healthy contribution between them, Western Digital, Hitachi, and the other disk vendors. And it would be an end of an era, with Alan Shugart’s old company going the way of MG Rover and the rest.

Anyone paying attention knows I’m not particular sanguine about the near-term prospects for solid-state disks (SSDs) and hybrid hard disk drives (H-HDDs) in the enterprise storage space, but I’m not foolish enough to discount them entirely. With that in mind, it’s worthwhile noting the debut of the first commercially-available retail(ish) SATA SSD from SanDisk. Read more below… Continue Reading »