Mitsumi USB Media Drive FA 401 review

Doesn't everyone know? The floppy drive is dead. Even Mitsumi, the uncrowned king of floppy drive manufacturers, understands this, but in our meeting its representative shrugged his shoulders and admitted, 'The consumer still wants it.'

And so this 7-in-1 media drive was born: a portable floppy drive that also reads and writes to CompactFlash, the Microdrive, Memory Stick, SmartMedia, SD and MMC cards. You'll need to keep the drivers CD to hand if you use Windows 98 or 98 SE, but if your PC runs Windows ME, 2000 or XP just plug it into your USB port (no external power is required).

Two new drives will then appear in My Computer: a floppy drive and a Removable Disk. We applaud the single Removable Disk concept, as other card readers provide four, unlabelled Removable Disk drives to choose from, and remembering which is which can be tricky.

What we don't applaud is the misleading packaging, which states 'USB 2.0 full-speed compliant' - undeniably true, but we thought we were getting a USB 2 device until we started transferring files. Forget the 17 seconds Logic3's 6-in-1 Card Reader/Writer (see issue 107, p46) took to copy 60MB of files from a CompactFlash drive; we had to wait a minute, seven seconds.

To be fair, Mitsumi isn't using the USB 2 logo on the box, but it's still defying the instructions of the USB organisation (www.usb. org) by using the old USB logo on its packaging. A pedantic point, maybe, but what's the sense of logos unless you use them correctly?

This isn't the most portable of units either, weighing 380g - compare that to the 63g of Crucial's 6-in1 Portable Card Reader (see issue 107, p46) and 90g of Logic3's drive. Nonetheless, if you want a USB floppy with the ability to read and write different Flash memory cards, it does the job - and at £33 it doesn't cost a fortune.