SmartMedia 5V Readers

Most audio gear which uses SmartMedia cards (Boss SP-303, SP-505, etc.) utilize the much more common and higher capacity 3.3V cards. Unfortunately, there are a few Boss/Roland devices (Boss SP-202, Roland MC-505, JX-305, JP-8080) which require the far more rare and limited capacity (2MB and 4MB) 5V SmartMedia cards: Roland S2M-5, FujiFilm MG-2, Roland S4M-5, and FujiFilm MG-4 being the typical selection of these costly storage units.

Formerly known as Solid State Floppy Disk Card

As if the scarcity and expense of these 5 volt cards wasn’t enough of an obstacle, finding USB card readers which support that specific variety of legacy SmartMedia can be rather difficult to identify.

While other options which support 5V SmartMedia certainly exist (especially on Windows 95/98/2000 with parallel port and/or PCMCIA interface), there are only a couple which are known to work with 5V, USB, and Windows XP.

Sidenote: On an old Windows 95/98/ME/2000 laptop, the Ratoc SMA01U SmartMedia PC Card supports both 5V and 3.3V SmartMedia.

THE MOST MODERN 5V SMARTMEDIA COMPATIBLE USB READERS CURRENTLY KNOWN

SDDR-55 ImageMate SmartMedia USB

SDDR-09 ImageMate SmartMedia USB

Both of these dual-voltage SanDisk models support 5V and 3.3V SmartMedia over USB and have drivers which can be installed on Windows systems up to XP and classic Mac. However, the SDDR-55 model is newer and also has OSX drivers which should work on early 32-bit flavors, and the older SDDR-09 does not have native XP drivers, so it depends upon forcing the Windows 2000 drivers.

Interestingly, both the SDDR-09 and SDDR-55 can be used under Linux via a kernel patch.

RATOC SMA03U

This is another dual-voltage USB SmartMedia reader with solid driver support, but it is almost impossible to find—to the point of almost not even being a consideration.

In the unlikely event one can be found, it is known to operate in Windows XP, OSX 10.3 and Linux.

The SDDR-55 is probably the best available choice, but none of these have 64-bit drivers, or operate as a driverless mass-storage device, so options are limited in a modern workflow, unlike the extremely commonplace 3.3V only SmartMedia card readers.

DRIVERS
SanDisk ImageMate SDDR-09 Driver Collection
Contains: Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000 and Macintosh OS 8.6 / 9.0.4 drivers.

SanDisk ImageMate SDDR-55 Driver Collection
Contains: Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP and Macintosh OS 8.6 / 9.0.4 / 9.1x / 9.2x / 10.1 (OSX) drivers.

RATOC SMA03U Driver Collection
Contains: Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, Linux, and Macintosh 8.5.1 through 10.3 (OSX) drivers.