The FlashPath adaptor for SmartMedia was introduced by SmartDisk in 1998, and was aimed at owners of digital cameras that wanted an easy way to transfer photos to their PC or Mac without having to use a serial cable. It was also possible to use the adaptor with a SmartMedia card for general data storage, and this offered much greater capacity than a standard floppy disk.
The FlashPath adaptor took the form of a 3.5-inch High Density microfloppy disk with a slot for the SmartMedia card on the side. The adaptor took two batteries, and required drivers to be installed on the computer. On a PC, the FlashPath adaptor allowed the SmartMedia card to be read and written to, while on a Mac it was read-only.
A FlashPath adaptor was convenient to use, but was limited to floppy disk speeds.
SmartMedia was a popular memory card format for digital cameras but because no cards beyond 128 MB were released, camera manufacturers eventually switched to other formats such as Secure Digital or xD. While this made the FlashPath adaptor redundant for SmartMedia, other versions of the adaptor for Memory Stick and MultiMediaCard cards were also produced.
Dimensions: 94 mm × 90 mm × 3.3 mm
Capacity: 2 MB to 128 MB (depending on SmartMedia card used)