One of the best features of the Dell Mini 9 is that it ships with either an 8GB Solid State Drive (SSD), or a 16GB SSD but unfortunately this also has its drawbacks. You may quickly find yourself running out of space, especially on the 8GB version, and as an SSD upgrade would cost about the same price as buying a new netbook, it isn’t really a option.
One alternative, and this applies not just to the Dell Mini 9, but to any netbook that accepts Secure Digital Cards (SD cards), is to purchase a large capacity SD card and use that as an extra hard drive.
This is a lot simpler than you’d think, and provides far more benefits than simply increasing the storage capacity on the device.
Boost your storage
How simple? You need only purchase the card, and then slot it into the card reader. If you’re using Windows XP, you’re done and if you are using Ubuntu, you’re done! In both cases the Operating System will recognise the card as extra storage and use can simply use it as such from then on.
If your netbook supports SDHC cards. like the Dell Mini 9, you can purchase an 8GB SD card to give the device a serious storage boost, alternatively you can purchase a microSD card of a similar capacity. Your netbook may not support microSD cards, but all our microSD cards include an SD adaptor, which means that they can be used as if they were an SD card, as well as being used as a microSD card.
Security
So you have your nice, shiny and new Dell Mini 9 and you take it everywhere with you, and do everything on it; which of course will soon have you wondering – what if! What if you lose it? What if you some miscreant steals it? What information will they be able to get hold of? Sadly, the answer is everything that you have on there, unless you encrypt it.
The next version of Windows, Windows 7, will apparently offer to encrypt your flash memory cards and USB drives for you when you first connect them; giving the option of a password and/or a keyfile. Fortunately, you won’t have to wait for Windows 7, there are free programs that can do similar things. Truecrypt is one of the easiest to use and most versatile.
Simply install the program and then insert your SD flash card. You then have two options; if you are only ever going to use the drive inside your Dell Mini 9, or similar netbook, you can wipe the disk and encrypt the whole disk; if you are likely to take the disk out and use it in other PCs that won’t have Truecrypt installed, you can create a traveller disk.
The former means that you can use the drive like any other hard drive, but with everything that is written to the drive being encrypted ‘on-the-fly’, the latter means that you can use the SD card on any PC and will simply need to enter the password to access the encrypted section of the drive.
The best option is probably the Traveller Disk (Tools > Traveller Disk Setup) option as that means that the disk is usable if it is taken out of your netbook, but whatever option you choose, Truecrypt guides you through it. Like Windows 7 you have a choice of using a keyfile or keyfiles and/or a password.
Unbreakable
A keyfile can either be created or any file used on your PC. A word of warning however, a keyfile is exactly that, a key to open the drive/file if you forget which file you used, or that file is lost or altered in any way, you won’t be able to gain access to your drive/files.
There is no way to crack this type of encryption, it is said that even with all the computing power in the world it would take years, if not centuries to crack a decent keyfile(s) or passwords. Make sure you backup your keyfile(s), just in case.
With Windows XP you have a further option once the SD card has been encrypted. When inserted the card appears under removable storage devices in My Computer. However you can mount it as a new hard drive by simply entering the password and opening with Truecrypt, you can then use it as you would any normal hard drive.
on Apr 27th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
How does the transfer speed of SD cards compare with other storage sources (thumbdrives, external hard drives, etc.)? I’d like to stick my mp3s on a SD card but am worried that they might be choppy when playing from the card.
on Apr 27th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Hello Will, thank you for commenting.
Transfer speeds are a tricky area and are determined by many factors, such as the connection, rather than just the speed of the device, but a basic rule of thumb is below:
USB 1.0 – 0.192 MB/s
USB 1.1 – 1.5 MB/s
CD-ROM – 7-8 MB/s
FireWire 100 – 12 MB/s
100Mb/s Ethernet – 12.5 MB/s
SD Card – 6-30 MB/s (minimum of 6MB/s, maximum depends on card)
FireWire 400 – 50 MB/s
USB 2.0 – 60 MB/s
EIDE HD – 80 MB/s
GIGABIT Ethernet – 125 MB/s
SATA 150 – 150 MB/s
SATA 2 – 300 MB/s
Things like USB hard drives, and thumb drives would depend on the USB connection, i.e. USB 1.0 or USB 2.0. But unless you are transferring large files you aren’t like to notice the difference between USB2.0 and SD cards, many people, including myself, use SD cards as hard drives and don’t notice any difference in speed in day to day usage.
As far as MP3 go, even at the maximum bitrate (320 kbit/s), it is still only 0.04 MB/s a second needed to play it from the card, so an SD card will handle MP3’s without any problems (most MP3 and MP3 enabled phones use some form of SD cards, such miniSD or microSD).
The only time you may notice a lag would be playing high definition movies, HD-DVD and Bluray both use about 4.5 MB/s bit rate, so you’d have to ensure you get a SD card that has a speed rating of Class 6 – which is 6 MB/s and above.