Update! Tiny, dense, but a little slow
Written: Nov 09 '02 (Updated Jan 25 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Tiny, large capacity, only format for my MP3 player.
Cons: Seems slow, not cheap.
The Bottom Line: If you need MMC, I think this is a good value for the amount of memory you get.
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| jtjackson's Full Review: SIMPLE TECHNOLOGY INC. 128MB MULTIMEDIA CARD STI-... |
I wanted to expand the memory capacity of my MP3 player (Bantam Interactive BA-350, which I love. See my review) beyond the basic 128 MB it came with. The expansion slot is an MMC slot, so I started looking for MMC cards. The largest I saw (about 2-3 months ago) was 64 MB, but some manufacturer was advertising a future 128 MB card, so I decided to hold out for a bit.
By the time I remembered to shop again, there were three different ones available. I picked the Simple Technology STI-MMC/128 card for three reasons:
1. I had heard of Simple Technology.
2. It wasn't the most expensive one available.
3. The cheapest one I saw was a company I had never heard of, and I was a little leery of buying it just for the price.
This thing is tiny. It's just about the size of a stack of maybe 10 or 15 US First Class postage stamps stuck on top of each other. I imagine it's pretty easy to lose, but I doubt that I'll ever take it out of my MP3 player. It came with a little plastic case for storage and transportation.
I slid it into my MP3 player, connected it to a USB cable, and started up the software to set up the player. Sure enough, there was now 256 MB or memory instead of 128 MB. I let the software initialize the MMC, and downloaded a few songs to it, and it seems to work fine.
However, it's slower than the internal memory. A lot slower. The software gives a rough estimate of transfer rates to the player. The internal 128 MB typically clocks in at somewhere around 320-330 kBytes/s. The 128 MB MMC drops down to somewhere around 80-90 kBytes/s. That's writing, not reading, and I don't really have a good way to test reading, but reading has to be much slower before the memory can't keep up with the player (even at a very high quality 320 kbits/s MP3 encoding, the player only needs to read from memory at 40 kBytes/s).
So for now, at least, I'm happy. I might find somebody with another brand of MMC and see how fast it is, but I don't expect a slide-in memory cartridge to be as fast as the on-board memory. I think I was just a little surprised to see the rates drop to 1/4.
Update:
I soon found that it didn't work correctly with my MP3 player. When the player was playing off the MMC card, I would hear the same song multiple times, but not necessarily the entire song. I'll put more details on the problem in an update to my Bantam BA350 review, but in the end, I found that the SimpleTech MMC card wasn't compatible with my MP3 player. It wasn't defective, so I don't have any reason to lower my rating. I still think it's a good value, but I now know to check for compatibility with device manufacturers.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
jtjackson
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Location: Ellicott City, MD
Reviews written: 73
Trusted by: 5 members
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