We now have an Asus Eee 4G PC in the family. We are still very happy with the Eee 4G PC sub notebook and would recommend it to anyone looking for a starter computer for a child or for something small, capable and very easy to carry around. The Eee 4G is limited on the storage side though as it has no conventional disk drive and coming with 4GB of solid state storage only.

Limited storage

The solid state storage is nice and robust, but a significant amount of the 4GB is used up by the Linux operating system leaving only about 1.5 GB for user content. Now for my son’s homework and other text files this would probably be fine for the foreseeable future, however he already wants to store some music and digital images on the computer. My wife also uses the Eee a lot and so we are shortly going to have to think about additional storage.

Interface and storage options

Fortunately the Eee 4G PC comes with plenty of interfaces. There is the wired and wireless networking, a good number of USB sockets and a media card reader that excepts SD and SDHC cards. So there are plenty of options to access external storage. The Eee can always access a shared drive on our home desktop PC which also acts as our server, but this of course is only usable when at home. One approach that I have been looking at is to maximise the use of the SD card slot. I investigated and found this very useful SanDisk 4GB Extreme III SDHC Memory Card & Card Reader, which I think is just the ticket for an Eee owner. Why the card reader as well as the card? Well this would make it easy to transfer content from the Eee to other computers who don’t have card readers.

I have also looked at external hard drives for the Eee, which I will cover in the next post.

Have you got an Asus Eee 4G PC? What do you use for external storage?