The Nifty MiniDrive Redux
A little surprise arrived in the mail today. The postman delivered the Nifty MiniDrive I bought on KickStarter. I have installed it in my 2010 MacBook Pro.
I’d forgotten all about this little gizmo until today (it’s more than a year since I ordered it). Naturally it took me ages to find the microSD card I’d bought to populate the drive with back when I ordered it (wouldn’t you know it, after searching my flat top-to-bottom, I found the card in a pocket in my laptop sleeve!)
I slipped the card, a SanDisk Ultra 64GB Class 10, into the MiniDrive; inserted the MiniDrive in the MacBook and the disk appeared on my desktop almost immediately. Now I’ve got a nice little 64GB scratch-disk that stays semi-permanently installed. I redirected my Downloads folder to the MiniDrive and have decided to use it as intermediate storage for temporary and work-in-progress files.
I’ve rebooted, hibernated and put to sleep then awakened the computer all without issue. The Nifty MiniDrive just works. Can’t ask for more than that.
How Does It Perform?
In a word, terribly!
I never expected this to be a fast drive. It’s a good job I didn’t, it’s glacial in both reads and writes.
| Disk | Write Speed | Read Speed |
|---|---|---|
| Nifty MiniDrive | 7MB/s | 21MB/s |
| Crucial M4 SSD | 185MB/s | 225MB/s |
| RAM Disk | 705MB/s | 608MB/s |
So one thing’s for sure, I won’t be doing any video work on this drive. But that’s not why I bought it. I simply wanted a working area, a little bit of temporary storage that I could use before I commit things to my main drive. I’ve used USB thumb drives for this for years and they’ve always served me well. So does the Nifty MiniDrive have a place in my set-up? Absolutely. It’s a no-brainer. 64GB of always-available storage, isolated from my main drive. But the real beauty of the MiniDrive is that it stays in place. It sits flush with the MacBook’s unibody, it won’t snag on my laptop sleeve. I’ll never have to think about it again. That makes it worth it’s weight in gold to me.