Store Dropbox Data on a Removable Drive

Back in January, I was trying to move my Dropbox files off of my netbook’s little SSD drive and onto an SD storage card. No matter what I tried, I’d get an error about not being allowed to use a removable drive for such purposes.

I tried the exact same thing with Live Mesh beta and had the exact same issue.

Fast forward a couple of months and I’m happy to say that I now have the solution courtesy of a forum post I happened to stumble over today. In that thread, “Adam S” links out to a great Microsoft KB article with instructions on how to create a “mounted drive” in Windows XP and Server 2003.

A mounted drive is a drive that is mapped to an empty folder on a volume that uses the NTFS file system. Mounted drives function as any other drives, but they are assigned drive paths instead of drive letters. When you view a mounted drive in Windows Explorer, it appears as a drive icon in the path in which it is mounted.

I created a new and empty folder named c:\SD_Card. I then followed the instructions in the KB article to link my SD Card’s D: drive to that folder. Now, visiting c:\SD_Card is the same as viewing the D: drive directly. However, XP doesn’t realize that C:\SD_Card is removable.

Next, a quick visit to the Dropbox Preferences (just right-click on the Dropbox tray icon) and I gave it a new folder under c:\SD_Card.

That’s it. Cool, huh?

Small Side Adventure with an SDHC card

I quickly realized that my little 1GB SD card wasn’t going to cut the mustard and ran out and picked up a 4GB SDHC card. Alas, my little Asus Eee (4G model) would see the card but couldn’t format it.

I rebooted with my Knoppix boot USB drive and fired up fdisk. It saw and re-partitioned the card (to Fat32) but when back in Windows I still couldn’t format it…

Just for grins, I tossed it in my daughter’s digital camera. The camera asked if I wanted to format the card, I said and yes and… my Asus was now happier with the card!

Weird.

Next, I started copying some files over to that new card but the copies were going painfully slow. Estimating hours to copy 100MB kind of slow.

A little research turned up the “Slow Performance and Read/Write errors with SD cards” article at EEE User wiki and I learned that things might be better with a bit of over-clocking.

Now, I usually run eeectl for a mild overclock but I hadn’t started it up after the recent restart. On a whim, I started it up and the drive has worked flawlessly ever since.

Think I’ll add eeectl to my startup programs list!

Possibly Related posts:

1. Moving Dropbox
2. Follow-up to Netbook Linux Adventures
3. Windows Live Mesh or DropBox?
4. Large Dropbox Cache?
5. Dropbox and that Annoying Notifier