Card reader trouble & recommendations

[Tannin]

One of my new cameras has an SD card as well as a proper CF card. I don't use the SD slot much (CF is so much nicer to handle) but I keep an 8GB SD card in there for emergencies (such as running out of space on my CF cards).

I have now been through THREE different USB card readers and none of the bloody things work. A cheap one I had lying around, then a better one, and finally a supposedly good one. Typically, they just hang the computer, possibly because of the high capacity of the SD card.

For CF I have the fast Delkin PC Card reader that Pradeep (or possibly Lost6200) recommended to me years ago and despite poor mechanical design and some driver issues early on (now well sorted) it never lets me down.

But for SD I'm reduced to plugging the camera into the laptop, and it's a very slow and cumbersome and painful way of doing things.

So: what's the go for a FAST SD reader? I no longer care about the price, I just want the bloody thing to work: first time, every time.

Firewire? (Beware: 4-pin Firewire connectors - which I assume is what my laptop offers - cannot power a device, so although I'd like to free up USB slots by going Firewire, that might be more trouble than it's worth.

PCMCIA/PC Card? That would make a lot of sense: internal is always better than external. But who knows if my next laptop will support PC Cards? I'll be upgrading sometime within the next year, don't know what to, except that it will be (of course) a Thinkpad.

USB? I only have 2 USB ports, and I don't like dangly bits, but this might be the only option.

Bonus features: extra points for small, and for doing CF as well as SD (because it's good to have a spare high-speed reader when I'm on the road). Prefer not to have a zillion other slots for stupid I'll-never-touch-them-with-a-ten-foot-pole non-standard formats such as XD, $ony, & etc.

Remember: I can mail order from the States if they are not sold in Oz, but only from places that do overseas orders.

 

[Will Rickards]

An 8GB SD would have to be SDHC.
You should look for support for those cards in the card readers.
Not all cameras support the new SDHC so I assume a new chipset is needed to read it. So most card readers out there would need an updated chipset.

When I searched for USB Card Reader SDHC on newegg I got this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820283002
Manufacturer product page:
http://www.iogear.com/main.php?loc=product&Item=GFR212SD

 

[mubs]

Will's right; a standard SD card reader will have trouble with SDHC.

AFAIK, the king of SDHC readers is Sandisk's MicroMate. It's priced at USD 20, quite reasonable, and the page I am linking to has a link for "Customers outside the U.S. and Canada, please click here" (which I didn't). No specs are listed, and I had to download the user guide to determine that the interface is USB2. It's a dedicated SD/SDHC reader, so won't accept any other type of flash.

Hope this helps.

 

[Fushigi]

As Will said, they problem isn't with your readers. The problem is that you're not using cards the readers can recognize. Use 2GB and smaller cards and I'm sure they'd work fine.

Sandisk MobileMate or MicroMate readers work fine with high capacity cards and they're small. For an internal unit, this works fine.

 

[Tannin]

Thankyou gentlemen, a Sandisk Micromate it is then.

I couldn't find anywhere in Australia with them in stock, except for one place in Sydney with a bundle of 4GB Sandisk SD card and reader for $88. I don't really need another 4GB SD.

Shrug .... ordered it anyway. It will be interesting to see if the Sandisk card is any faster than the Transcend ones I usually use. My Transcend and Apacer CF cards are easily faster than the 8GB SD, so faster would be good.

 

[Mercutio]

Transcend's thumb drives are very often the highest performance models when product comparisons are done. I would not be surprised to find out that their SD cards are the same way.

 

[Gilbo]

I agree with Merc about the Transcend drives. Their thumb drives always kick ass in tests as well. Pretty much any of their flash products. I've bought a couple OCZ & Patriot SD cards lately though (my K10D & LX1 both use those) because they were on ridiculous rebates.

On the topic of an SD reader, I recently bought a pair of ]these (that's the only link I can find and it's where I get it in Canada, so it's not useful to you Australians). They read CF & SD (as well as XD for the Fuji F30 that gets taken out at nights sometimes), have a powered, 3-port USB hub (which is awesomely useful when you double-sided taped them to the edge of your desk), and are ridiculously cheap . I know you already bought, but that's my 2-cents late as it is.

Incidentally, I get data issues with Vista 64-bit if I daisy-chain the reader off two or more intermediate hubs ( it's probably Vista quite frankly --buggiest piece of crap I ever bought; got it for Photoshop because I refused to buy an overpriced Mac tower). The drives are daisy-chained off a single hub, but after two it craps out. I never corrupted any data. It just stops copying halfway (Vista says it's still going but it isn't). You have to cancel the copy if you can, safely remove the hardware, unplug it, reboot, power off, plug it in, & boot again. Vista can't handle hardware changes very well I find (Ubuntu, Gentoo, & Fedora are all happy as clams when I plug it in, unplug it, etc...). I don't know what the USB daisy-chaining rules regarding hubs are though, so maybe it's my fault...

 

[Tannin]

Off the top of my head, you'd be fairly restricted with daisy chaining - there are certainly cable length restrictions which vary for different sorts of devices, so you'd think daisy chaining would be problematic.

 

[Gilbo]

Probably my fault then... Everything works fine now that neither of them are more than 1 hub away from the actual computer.

 

[Mercutio]

Uh, no.
The rule is, up to 7 hubs chained off a root hub for a total maximum of 128 device per root.

 

[Tannin]

Merc, how does that square with cable length restrictions though? OK, we don't have speed of light issues with multiple stacked hubs (i.e., not the same thing as ethernet cable length restrictions) but I'm talking about generalised signal quality loss - my all-purpose rule-of-thumb is that every metal to metal press-fit connection cuts your signal quality by something like 10-20% on pretty much any sort of cable (telephone, network, speaker cables, whatever), and as soon as you start trying to have too many different bits of wire in a circuit, you start having weird problems. Is this not a factor with USB?

 

[mubs]

The hubs are supposed to act as repeaters, amplifying the signal to spec. The signal degrades as it flows along the wire, but the next hub in the chain amplifies it back up. And so on till it reaches the device. Merc is right as far as the USB spec goes, but I think in practice the max tends to be 2 or 3 hubs in a chain.

 

[[Edit]]

...For CF I have the fast Delkin PC Card reader that Pradeep (or possibly Lost6200) recommended to me years ago...

Probably a recommendation from this entity:

He has recommended and used the "fast" Delkin card reader to many here and in the real world (after testing one at an exposition).

So: what's the go for a FAST SD reader? I no longer care about the price, I just want the bloody thing to work: first time, every time.

For desktop usage: SanDisk USB2 readers are fast, compatible, troublefree, well-built, and ergonomic. These are easy to get just about anywhere on Earth.

I also have a very fast external Addonics flash card reader that connects via Firewire. Unless you do a LOT of reading and writing to/from flash cards, it probably is not worth the over US$100 price tag.

For notebook / on-the-road usage: A 25-in-1 (or whatever they call them this week -- OK, a "many-in-one") PNY brand USB2 reader. This PNY flash reader pack up very well as the short stubby USB2 cable (about 5 cm in length) folds into the reader completely. The reader is also very compatible and fast. And if that wasn't enough, it is very affordable.

Firewire?

Too pricey and a bit rare. Besides, from all the reports I've heard over the years, Firewire devices in general are significantly more susceptible to death-by-static-discharge than USB devices.

PCMCIA/PC Card?

PCMCIA is dead dead dead. PC Card is dead. Long live PCIe -- the replacement for PC Card (external PCIe). And, no, I have not seen a PCIe card reader.

USB?

USB2 is obviously the way to go. (Some say that even Apple has more or less given up on promoting Firewire beyond a video camera connectivity bus.)

 

[LunarMist]

PCMCIA is dead dead dead. PC Card is dead. Long live PCIe -- the replacement for PC Card (external PCIe). And, no, I have not seen a PCIe card reader.



USB2 is obviously the way to go. (Some say that even Apple has more or less given up on promoting Firewire beyond a video camera connectivity bus.)

ExpressCard CF card readers work just fine, Gary. Here is nice, cheap and very fast UDMA USB reader.

The Extreme IV cards are recommended for UDMA speed if needed. Yet only the newest cameras like the 1Ds MK III and D3/D300 can use UDMA. (The 1D MK III is older technology that does not use UDMA, but produces small RAW files and has a relatively large buffer.) I usually carry over 70GB of CF cards - enough for a 1 day shoot - and do not need to download in a hurry.

 

[[Edit]]

I usually carry over 70GB of CF cards - enough for a 1 day shoot - and do not need to download in a hurry.

Thanks, Lunar.

I meant to say ExpressCard -- instead of dredging up the fact that ExpressCard is simply the standard form of a removable native PCIe device (250 Gb/s full-duplex block data rate per lane). <drool>

Out in the field, I still (occasionally) use my 80 GB Kangaru storage device to dump files onto from my 2-each 1 GB and 2-each 2 GB SanDisk UltraII Compact Flash cards.

 

[ddrueding]

I run around with a 4GB Extreme III card in the camera and a 2GB Ultra II card as a spare. I've never had to switch to the spare. 70GB is a lot of shots, what type of photography encourages that? Sports?

 

[Gilbo]

Thanks, Lunar.

I meant to say ExpressCard -- instead of dredging up the fact that ExpressCard is simply the standard form of a removable native PCIe device (250 Gb/s full-duplex block data rate per lane). <drool>

Out in the field, I still (occasionally) use my 80 GB Kangaru storage device to dump files onto from my 2-each 1 GB and 2-each 2 GB SanDisk UltraII Compact Flash cards.

Not necessarily true. ExpressCard supports PCIe and USB 2.0 Highspeed connections in the same form factor. It depends on the card as to which bus is actually used.

Of all the ExpressCard readers available presently only one uses the PCIe connection (I can't recall the make or model off-hand; I'll try and dig it up in the near future), and it was only just announced (within the last month). I.e. for all intents and purposes ExpressCard readers are USB 2 readers.

 

[[Edit]]

Not necessarily true. ExpressCard supports PCIe and USB 2.0 Highspeed connections in the same form factor. It depends on the card as to which bus is actually used...

Thanks for correcting me on that. It certainly makes sense for such ExpressCard add-in devices (like FaxModems, etc) to use the internal USB2 port instead of a screaming fast PCIe port (lane).

By the way, it looks like I meant 2.5 Gb/s not 250 Gb/s up there. (sheesh!). :compress: