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It's amazing to think that we've gone to the moon, yet the computing power found within the chip inside a talking greeting card contains far more computing power than all the computers those astronauts used to get there and back.
Our technology is accelerating at a furious pace and we're all lucky to be alive to witness it. Yet most of the chips inside our consumer electronic devices remain hidden. We know they're inside but we don't mess with them because we don't have to. We just plug into our iPods, point our digital cameras and they all just work.
However, there actually is one kind of chip we consumers must interact with when using our high-tech toys. The Flash Memory chip is fast becoming the storage medium of choice when it comes to digital cameras, MP3 players, hand-held electronic games and other devices that offer an expandable memory capacity.
Flash memory is different from the memory found in personal computers in that the information doesn't go away when the power is turned off. That's a good thing. Otherwise, you'd lose all the pictures you took with your digital camera when its battery ran out.
If you've ever wondered why your MP3 player retains the music within or your cell phone keeps all your names and phone numbers in its address book when the power runs dry, it's because these devices use flash memory.
Many of these products offer removable flash memory chips or cards so that you can increase the storage capacity of the device, or replace one when it fills up. The capacity of these memory cards has also grown exponentially.
Originally, it was a big deal to have a single megabyte of flash memory and it cost hundreds of dollars. Now you can get cards with 2 gigabytes and more for less than $50.
But there's a problem: More than 50 standards or types of these flash memory cards exist, and they're incompatible. The first version to appear was the CompactFlash and today that has different versions like Type I and Type II, and even those have different transfer speed versions. Then there's the Sony Memory Stick (with at least 10 different types and speeds available now), SD, Mini SD, Micro SD, MMC/SD, Olympus DC cards; the list goes on and on.
To help deal with all these flash memory standards, developers have come out with universal card readers that attempt to read as many of these card standards as they can.
IOGEAR's 56-in-1 Memory Card Reader/ Writer seems to offer the widest variety of supported flash memory cards to date. You can see if your electronic gizmo's card is supported by going to www.iogear.com and reading the listings for yourself.
The 56-in-1 works on both Windows and Macintosh computers without additional drivers and supports USB 2.0 for transfer speeds of up to 480 megabits per second -- a good thing, given the amount of data these cards can store.
The 56-in-1 draws its power directly from the USB connection to your computer. It works with all the popular memory cards without any special adaptors.
This incredibly useful little device includes a USB cable and sells for $19.95. It comes with a three-year warranty, but given the speed at which we're moving technologically, flash memory might become obsolete before that runs out.
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