Customer Reviews

SanDisk FlashPath Floppy Disk Reader (SDDR-21-01)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I bought my FlashPath adapter soon after my first digital camera. I was getting tired of running another set of batteries to an early death to download the pictures, and this solution was much more portable than a roll of cables. However, working for a university, I've had to make presentations at various locations with various levels of technology to work with, and the ability to use a 16M SmartMedia card with my FlashPath adapter has saved a presentation more than once. Most presentations require a Zip disk rather than a floppy, but I can have the best of both worlds.

...First, I would say, it is an good design, a must for computers not having USB ports and it is convenient to use compared to USB reader(unfortunetly, the USB ports is usually located on the back of the computer). then the bad part: 1. No instructions on installing, no documents, papers and wrong information on Web support. Although installation went smoothly, but it is not the way doing business. Buyer needs to be pretty experienced with computer files. 2. Although the physical size of the product is compatible to a standard 1.44" FD, it does not mean you can use this adapter to any computer you like. First, you need to install the driver and it may not work with your system, (i.e Laptop FDD, Imoge FDD, USB FDD, etc) and this is not mentioned on technical description. One the motivations of buying this adaptor was to use it as a ZIP driver, so I can tranfer big files to different computers, but obviously, not every computer will install the driver for this. 3. Speed. Although it is much faster than serial port,but it is still very slow. I carefully measured the speed, it is about 3K bytes / second, that is about 1.8M bytes per minute. Just image that how long it will take to transfer 64M data, which is the memory size used in my digital camera. By the way, a USB adaptor can get a trasfer rate of 1.5M bytes per second.

Conclusion: Buy it if you have no choice (no USB port)

This is a great little device. I got it to go with my Olympus D-490 digicam and it works great with the smartcards. At first I thought I made a bad purchase becuase the manual said it only worked with cards up to 32M. This was true until I downloaded the software from their website. It works perfectly now with the 32 and the 64 MB smart media. I didn't give it five stars because the file transfer is slower than I thought it would be. It takes about 15 to 20 seconds to copy 1MB. Still, this is much faster than the serial cable, and much more convenient. No cables lying around, and you can turn the camera off and not drain the batteries while you transfer the pictures to the computer. It's also handy for moving large files from one computer to another when you don't have a network connection. I would recommend this for people who have a smart media device with no USB connection.

I have not used a USB reader, so I cannot comment on speed from that standpoint. This was a very good solution for my family, our computer has some sort of peripheral coming out of every port and I love the idea of no cables to work with. While its true that the flashpath does not come with much information, I think its because it doesn't really need it. It took me less than 10 minutes to open the package, load the driver and retrieve photos from my smartmedia. The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is that it seems expensive, especially when compared to a USB reader.