Digital Focus: Make Your Own DVDs

Dave's Favorites: Multi Flash

VHS, DVD, CD, CompactFlash, Memory Stick, DV, SD, SACD, DVD-Audio, DIMM, RDRAM, floppy, cassette, MiniDisk: There are so many formats floating around that it's hard to keep track of them all. Nowhere is this format proliferation more apparent than among portable devices. I have an MP3 player that uses CompactFlash, a digital camera with a SmartMedia slot, a Palm with SD memory, and a Sony DV camcorder that accepts Memory Stick. That means I'd need four different gadgets on my desktop to transfer data to my PC. Sheesh--that's just ridiculous.

That's why my new best friend is Acom Data, a relatively unknown data storage company that makes the $89 Multi Flash, a multiformat USB memory card reader.

The Multi Flash reader connects to the USB port of your PC and takes up as much space as a small paperback book on your desktop. Nonetheless, it has four card slots, accepting SmartMedia, CompactFlash, Memory Stick, and SD/MMC cards. That's every memory format in common use today, and I should know--I have them all.

When you've got Multi Flash set up, you can open My Computer to find that Windows treats each memory card as an independent removable device. That means you can drag and drop files from your PC to any memory card or from a card to the PC. Even better, you can copy files among the memory cards--I routinely drag images from my digital camera's SmartMedia card to a Memory Stick, for instance, and then pop the Stick into a Sony notebook.

If you work with more than one or two memory formats, I can't recommend the Multi Flash highly enough for putting all your memory card needs in one little desktop adapter. You can buy it at your local computer store or read about it at Acom Data's Web site.