Simpledrive Mini: 4GB microdrive for the masses
A MICRODRIVE used to be expensive, very expensive. Now, the competition with flash memory based devices and the appearance of new players in the storage market has made microdrive prices plummet.
Simpletech decided to enter the microdrives market and give the flash thumb drives some competition with its Simpledrive Mini, which at around $119 greenbacks at time of this writing is still $40 cheaper than a comparable compactflash-format Microdrive (like this one from Hitachi), and $157 greenbacks cheaper than a $276, 4 GB compactflash card from Sandisk.
To make it work on 98SE, they'd have had to include their own drivers. And guess what, if you look at ITE's web page it says "The IT8903AE can operate in Win XP, Win 2000, Win ME, Mac OS 8.6 and above, and Linux OS without driver needed. It also can operate in Win 98SE with device driver.".
In fact I was able to plug it into a system running Linspire linux and the unit showed up just fine. So a bit of thumbs down to Simpletech for having a device that works with linux but not advertising it as such.
I give the Simpledrive Mini three and a half Fernandos in my personal one-to-five rating scale (or 7/10 if you wish). It's a good drive at a great price, useful for carrying in a pocket and moving A LOT of data around, with a few limitations listed above. I'd have given it 4/5 if it included Win98SE drivers, and probably 5.0 if it mentioned linux as a supported OS, since it does work with the penguin OS.
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