9 out of 9 people found this review helpful.
Better than usb 1.0 and yes 2.0 (in my opinion)
Date of Review: Oct 27, 2007
The Bottom Line: This device is great! The unit is plug and go, go, go!!! Its firewire baby!!! The reader works so well it surpassed my expectations.
This device is great!!!
The unit is plug and go, go, go!!! Its firewire baby!!! The reader works so well it surpassed my expectations.
I have several Compact flash 1.0gb to 4.0gb cards. I use these in my camera and digital video recorder, and video camera. Ranging from Generic to Lexar to Sandisk Ultra Extreme II. The faster your card the faster this unit will read!
I did many timed tests with different compact flash media cards with the same 800mb file.
The Extreme II card being the fastest... I used it in my final test with the SDDRX4 reader vs my Inland Usb 2.0 reader (a cheap good reader)
My 2 test computers were my old (but still reliable) 2001' Apple Ibook 500mhz G3 laptop. It only has a usb 1.0 port but the firewire port screams!
The other computer is my Gigabyte P35-DS4 with built in firewire and usb 2.0.
Both USB 1.0 & 2.0 lagged when multi-tasking because they grabbed some CPU power for themselves. Although 2.0 is respectfully faster than 1.0.
My Firewire tests in both old and new computers did not slow at all or was not noticeable when Multitasking!
WOW!!!
It works with both Firewire ieee 1394a & 1394b. That is the oval old 6 pin and the newer 4 pin. The older firewire 1394a does up to 400 Mbit/s while the newer does up to 800 Mbit/s.
The unit comes with both oval 1394a and square 1394b 3 foot cables in the package!
The unit is built well and comes with some Sandisk drive recovery utility that I gave to my friend. He said it works well.
Lexar makes a similar drive but I think it has Firewire ieee1394a and usb 2.0 ports only but sounds good!
Points:
1) Great for transferring, playing or viewing files. Can be used to bypass old usb 1.0 on older Ibooks and Powerbooks.
2) Only reads compact flash cards, So what! Buy Jobo sd to cf card adapter(se9108 or secf17) to fix this problem. HeHeHe!