SSDs are amazing. They’re so fast, once you’re using to using one in your day-to-day work, switching back to working from a traditional hard drive is painful. You’ll get so used to apps opening nearly instantly that everything will feel slow озеро Ладожское. It’s no wonder Apple’s switched its most popular laptops – the MacBook Air and the new MacBook Pro Retina Display – to SSD.
There’s only one problem: SSDs cost more per gigabyte than traditional hard drives, so instead of the roomy 500Gb hard drives you might be used to in other computers, a MacBook with an SSD will likely only have 128-256Gb of storage. With HD video downloads and retina display ready apps, it’s rather easy to fill that up.
If you’ve got a 13″ Air or a Retina Display MacBook, though, you’ve got an SD card slot. Now what if that could be used to add extra storage that felt integrated fully with your Mac? That’s exactly what the Nifty MiniDrive - a tiny microSD card adaptor that sits flush with the exterior of your MacBook - sets out to do.
Seeing a Kickstarter Dream From Start to Finish The Nifty MiniDrive started its journey with a Kickstarter campaign back in July, 2012. Kickstarter, the poster child for crowdfunding, has been the incubation place for so many new products of late, but quite a few popular ones have struggled to meet their initial expectations, and the process from idea to real, finished product is often far longer than originally expected. The Nifty MiniDrive team hit their share of bumps in the road along the way, dragging their initial delivery time from the originally anticipated late October all the way to the end of February.
But along the way, the team behind the Nifty MiniDrive kept backers up-to-date on how everything was going through their Kickstarter updates, letting us see the behind-the-scenes process of turning a dream into reality with anodized aluminum, PCB assembly, force testing, manufacturing in China, shipping around the globe, and more. It was quite the interesting journey, one that’d make me – for one – much more cautious about thinking I could make a real product.
An Apple Quality microSD Adaptor In essence, the Nifty MiniDrive is just a microSD to SD card adaptor, much like the one that you’ll likely find included in the package if you purchase a microSD card today. If you’re running out of storage space on your MacBook, and you own a newer MacBook Pro or Air 13″, then the SD card slot gives you a way to add extra storage. The only problem is, an SD card will stick out of your MacBook, so you’ll need to pull it out and store it before dropping your MacBook in a bag to carry. The Nifty MiniDrive solves this problem by being just as long as the depth of your MacBook’s SD card slot, so you can push it in and leave it, making the microSD card’s storage feel much more like it’s just an extra internal hard drive.
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