Living With Apple's MacBook: The Second Time's The Charm

Yesterday, I told you that I thought I’d finally fingered the source of some mysterious disk access error messages I was seeing: a MobileLite 9-in-1 USB Card Reader:

My compadres at Kingston were understandably troubled when they read my writeup, and they asked me to Fedex them my reader along with the 2 GByte Crucial SD card I’d been using. In exchange, they quick-shipped me a replacement MobileLite, along with a 2 GByte Kingston SD card. For purposes of the test I just conducted, I set aside the Kingston card; its 120x speed rating might, I thought, mask any access time-related root cause of the Windows-discerned errors.

Instead, I grabbed an identical-twin 2 GByte Crucial card off the shelf. It’s not the exact card I’d used before, of course; that one’s enroute to Fountain Valley, CA for testing as I type these words. But I don’t think the card was the culprit, anyway, since it didn’t throw any errors when alternatively paired with my Sandisk USB reader.

The result? See for yourself:

That’s a still-clean Event Viewer, after I repeatedly shuffled 38 files of various sizes and types (cumulatively almost 100 MBytes in size) back and forth several times between the SD card and my MacBook HDD via the MobileLite intermediary. I used the exact same USB port as in yesterday’s test, along with the exact same USB cable.

I conclude that my first MobileLite was functionally flaky; odd that in spite of the abundant access error messages that I got when using it, transfers still seemed to be solid (although they seem much speedier now, with the surrogate). In retrospect, the fault source is more obvious; I recall that I would also occasionally run into scenarios where MobileLite insertions into the USB port wouldn’t be recognized by the system, or where card access attempts would result in perpetual Windows Explorer hourglass cursors. At the time, I blamed Microsoft

This replacement unit is seemingly flake-free, and this senior technical editor is therefore very happy. I’ll be curious to see if Kingston is able to replicate my problems when they fire up the gear I sent them!