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Put Nine Media Storage Types in Your Pocket

Finding you need to cram more storage on your devices and you're a little short on space? Portable storage maker, Addonics Technologies has taken the wraps off their version of a Swiss Army knife for storage devices.

The San Jose, California-based company said its new Addonics Pocket UDD (Ultra DigiDrive) is the first USB 2.0 external data storage Reader/Writer for PC Card (PCMCIA) hard drives and the most popular form factors of Flash memory cards.

The eight-ounce device is about the size of a portable CD player and supports Windows 98/SE, Me, 2000, XP, Mac OS X (support USB 1.1 only), and Linux kernel 2.4 or higher.

Standard PC Card hard drives and ATA Flash cards can be added and removed from the Pocket UDD like any removable media. To read/write to other flash media, Addonics said it provides the adapters to convert the flash media to PCMCIA form factor. The adapters can be purchased separately or as a bundled solution.

"Our target audience is users of the Toshiba PCMCIA hard drive and professional photographers who need fast download of large digital files to computers from various Flash media. Until now, the application for PCMCIA hard drive is very much limited to Notebook computers," said Addonics spokesman Bill Kwong.

When used with Addonics' optional CF DigiAdapter or the 4-in-1 DigiAdapter, the company said the Pocket UDD can also read/write to all popular Flash media including: CF-I, CF-II, Smart Media, Memory stick, Secure Digital Card, Multimedia Card or Micro Drive.

Users can even boot their system from the Addonics Pocket UDD via the USB port depending on the BIOS support on each computer.

The base model with USB 2.0 interface cable has a list price of $89, or $119 with FireWire interface cable and A/C power adapter. The 9-in-1 Pocket UDD models come bundled with the Addonics 4-in-1 DigiAdapter, the CF DigiAdapter, and USB 2.0 or FireWire cable and have a list price of $149 for the USB 2.0 version or $179 for the FireWire version.

Addonics said the devices would be sold through major catalog companies, resellers, VARs and distributors.