Unboxing! This is a tiny micro SD card reader, turning your memory card into a thumb drive.
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The reason I bought it is I have a lot of thumb drives, but each of them is only 4Gb or less. On the other hand, many operating system images these days, especially custom builds, are 1 DVD in size, which is 4.5 Gb, so you can’t fit an install image onto a 4 Gb thumb drive. So I have to boot from a thumb drive in WinPE mode, attach a USD HDD and install the operating system from the external HDD. Not really convenient. On the other had, I own a 32Gb micro SD card for my mobile device, and this card has more than enough storage to hold any installation image. The problem is very few BIOSes allow to boot from onboard card reader, even if your happen to have one. But this tiny USB card reader turns your SD card in a mass storage device, and confirmed to be bootable by at least one of my channel viewers. Well, let’s try it out then. Insert the card into the slot. Plug it into the USB port. The device is recognized, but the filesystem is not accessible. Since this 2gb SD Card comes from my old Linux phone, it may contain Linux file system, that obviously couldn’t be read by Windows. So I formated the card. That was the last time I saw the card working. Now it is not detected by any other device, that Linux phone included. I tried several utilities to fix the card, to no avail. I also tried to plug the card reader into the USB port without a card, and now it is not recognized anymore. So the device doesn’t work, and it also fried my SD card. Thankfully I was smart enough to test the device on a 2 Gb card I don’t use much – it would be painful to fry a 32gb card! Anyway, I could still find use for those 2Gb in some older devices I still use. Yes, the price was low, and I got a refund, even though I want to kill each time I read this “friend” in emails from Chinese suppliers. But I want to ask – how long this will last? Cheap price doesn’t justify selling defective crap, which I have to wait for about 6 weeks until it finally arrives. So I can’t really test myself if you can boot of those tiny card reader. But probably, next time I shop for SD cards – I will go to my local retailer and get one of those bundles, which not only include the nano card reader, but more important warranty. Until then, I’ll try to use this Android utility, which allows you to boot a PC using your Android device as mass storage. Obviously, you must be rooted for this.