Two years ago I really went out and splurged and got myself a halfway decent 6MP digital SLR camera, lenses, a travel case, and the largest capacity SD (Secure Digital) RAM card I could get at Best Buy. Altogether, I spent somewhere on or around $1,000. The SD card was 2GB. It was about $100 at the time, as far as I can remember. But meanwhile I've found myself using it from time to time like a tiny fingertip-held floppy disk.

One year ago, solid state drives started to take off, and 32GB capacities were about the biggest you could get. Anything more than that costed about $1,000.

Now, 32GB SD cards are available at Amazon.com for less than $300. It's this tiny little thing, and yet it has room enough to dual-boot the full installations of Vista and Linux with complete suite of developer tools. So then the questions become, do BIOS's support booting from these things? And, shouldn't these be the new solid state standard?

Might be a speed issue. "15MB" means that it transfers data at only 15MB/s, so perhaps therein lies the problem. 52x CD-ROM drives transfer at around 64 megabits per second (or 8 megabytes per second) so this transfer rate is only about double the speed of a standard high-speed CD-ROM drive. Whereas, a SanDisk SSD5000 Solid State Drive (64GB) has a transfer rate of 121MB/s, which is about eight times as fast as this little SD card.

Even so, the geek in me wonders how far one can go with shrinking UMPCs with technologies like this.