There are a lot of new portable storage solutions these days. Cell phones, digital cameras, and now even game consoles like the Wii can all take advantage of this technology. The technology is called flash memory. It’s special because it doesn’t require any power to save the data and it’s incredibly small. The memory cards range in size from the relatively large Compact Flash drives to the tiny micro-SD cards. After digital cameras began ditching the floppy disk, they switched over to flash memory of some sort. This drove the media mainstream and now it’s pretty common to see a variety of slots on the sides of cameras and phones. If you’d like to get your pictures or music from camera/phone to your PC, a flash media reader/writer is your best bet.A Flash Media Reader/Writer will typically include three or four slots. These slots are where the various types of memory cards are inserted to be either written to or read from by the PC. For example, my digital camera uses a Secure Digital (SD) Flash card. After taking pictures, I could put the SD card into the media reader and access those files as if the card was another disk drive. It will be given a letter like ‘F:’ or ‘G:’ depending on how many drives are already present on the computer. The files are then accessed by opening up the drive through ‘My Computer’ in Windows. Then just drag and drop them into your pictures folder. This is much easier than plugging the computer in with a USB cable and dealing with installing additional software. The write function is useful if you have a music device that has a flash card slot on it. Many cell phones these days double as music players. These media writers allow a user to quickly and easily get music onto the flash card and then pop it into the phone.
The bottom line:
If you have a digital camera and you use removable media such as Compact Flash, Secure Digital (SD), or micro-SD, I highly recommend that you pay the extra money and get one of these included in your PC purchase. If you have a fancy new cell phone with micro-SD capability and plan on using it for music or pictures, I’d also recommend it. If you don’t have a digital camera or fancy cell phone with flash capability, don’t bother with this.
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