With
the number of devices on the market today that requires portable
memory, it's a shame not any one standard has been accepted. For
the most part, CompactFlash (CF) is the most popular, but competing
standards such as Secure Digital (SD) are also very popular… particularly
among PDAs.
Most
devices have the ability to transfer data to and from a PC using
whatever connection they are equipped with. The problem with the
multiple memory types though, is that if you have a PDA that uses
SD, a digital camera that uses CF, and a Sony device that uses
a memory stick, you'll have to hook up all these devices to your
PC to transfer data. If you're lucky enough to have the free spots,
you can certainly hook them all up the same time, but that means
you'll have a lot of wire clutter. If you only have room for one
device, it will just be time consuming to swap out devices when
transferring data.
Memory
readers are nothing new, but when it comes to memory, and the
markets revolving around it, you can always count on Crucial
to have their hand in things. They recently announced a new product,
the Crucial
6 in 1 Card Reader, which as the name implies, has the ability
to read and write to six different memory types. They actually
have several readers available, but we chose to look at their
top-of-the-line reader.
Specifications
Media
Support:
Type I/II CompactFlash
SmartMedia
Secure Digital
MultiMediaCard
Memory Stick
IBM Microdrive
OS
support:
Windows 98/98SE/ME
Windows 2000/XP
Mac OS 8.6/9/X
Interface:
Supports USB 1.1
Power
Source:
USB Port
There
isn't any mention of Windows 95 support, which to be honest, doesn't
surprise me since Windows 95 didn't have native USB support. Windows
NT is not supported either. There isn't any mention of Linux support
on their site.
The
package consists of the 6 in 1 card reader, one USB, a driver
CD and an instruction guide. Sadly, the reader is only a USB1.1
device, which means we don't have the bandwidth of USB2.0 for
file transfers. If you only got a 16MB to 64MB memory card, this
probably isn't that big a deal, but 256MB cards will take forever
if you have to move a couple hundred megabytes of data. In Crucial's
defense, the majority of portable devices use USB1.1 anyways,
so it's not like you're going to be "downgrading" yourself.
The
card reader is designed to be portable, and considering it can
read six different memory types, Crucial did a great job of packaging
a product that is not only compact, but looks really sharp. With
its soft curves, and silver finish, it will not look out of place
even on Martha Stewart's desk. Then again, if her desk ends up
in a prison cell, I guess it may not suit the décor.
Cards
are inserted through the front of the device. There are only four
slots available, but a couple serve dual memory types. There is
one slot for Compact Flash/IBM Microdrives, one slot for Memory
Sticks, one slot for SD/MMC cards, a slot for Smart Media Cards.
A
bit of a surprise for me is the fact that the card reader requires
no external power. I guess this shouldn't be much of a shock since
memory cards don't draw much power, so the power supplied by the
USB port is sufficient enough.
Turning
on the drive is as easy as plugging it into an available USB slot.
As soon as it turns on, all the slots in the drive are automatically
enabled.
Each
drive is assigned to a specific memory type. Unfortunently, in
Windows Explorer, there is no way to differentiate between drives
since there's no description. What you can do though is reassign
the drive letters in such a way that you can make it easier for
yourself to remember. Since I am only using CF memory for now,
I chose to make it the highest drive letter not used by my hard
drive partitions or optical drives.
Testing
Test
Bed: Epox 8RDA+ nForce2: Athlon XP 2400+ provided by HighSpeed
PC (15x133: 2.0GHz), 2 x 256MB Crucial PC2700 Ram, ATi Radeon
9700 Pro, 120GB Western Digital SE 8MB Cache, Windows XP SP1, nForce
2 Unified Driver Package 2.0, ATi Catalyst 3.2
As
much as I would have liked to have tested with a half dozen memory
types, I only have three CF cards. All the cards vary in size, so
there's no real way to do an apples to apples speed test, so performance
tests will be done as follows:
Synthetic
Tests: SiSoft Sandra Disk Benchmark - Sandisk Ultra 256MB CF
Real
World Tests:
Compact Flash - Kodak 32MB vs Crucial 64MB vs Sandisk Ultra 256MB
- 31.4MB file transfer.
Media
Testing: AVI and MP3 playback
Synthetic
Tests
Synthetic
tests were run with a blank Sandisk Ultra 256MB CF, with a standard
Sandra 2003 file system benchmark.
Not
much to say here than what isn't obvious. It's certainly faster
than a Zip drive when it comes to copying files. I did a real world
test with a parallel Zip and found this to be the case as well.
If you have some extra memory cards, they would make a decent choice
for some additional storage, though don't expect great performance.
Real
World Tests
The
real world test was done transfering 31.4MB worth of JPEG files.
Using both a Kodak Camera Dock (with a Kodak DX3900 camera) and
the Crucial 6 in 1 Card Reader, we timed the amount of time it took
to transfer the images to the PC. We chose to use three different
cards for this test just to see if there would be any odd numbers.
For
the most part, both the camera dock, and the Crucial reader were
neck and neck. This actually doesn't come as much of a surprise,
since both devices are USB1.1. Although this isn't a CF review,
it's worth it to note that the Sandisk Ultra leads the pack. I'm
going to admit that this is a nice CF card, and the speed not only
saves time, but it should also save battery power as images seem
to save much quicker when I take them.
Media
Testing
I loaded
up a series of MP3s, and played them through Winamp 3.0. The MP3s
played fine, though switching between tracks, there was a slight
pop, and a bit of lag (about a half second). Playing the tracks
off the hard drive didn't exhibit these problems.
I then
copied a small 50MB MPEG-2 segment from WWE: RAW with the Rock and
Hurricane (damn, those guys are funny together), and played it through
Windows Media Player. The clip played fine, but fast forwarding,
or rewinding resulted in an audio lag.
Final
Words
The
Crucial 6 in 1 reader rates right up there as one of the more useful
products I've had a chance to tryout. Although I was limited with
my memory selection, there's no reason why there would be any issues
with any other memory types. Although I was very pleased with the
product, a few things did bother me…
I don't
really understand why Crucial chose to go with the USB1.1 interface,
as opposed to USB2.0. I'm aware that small file transfers won't
take long, but with the large memory cards gaining popularity, a
faster interface would have been a nice addition.
I would
have also liked to have seen a USB jack built into the front of
the device. The reason for this is thumbdrives are another popular
memory type, and along with the other six types they support, this
would have really covered all the bases.
Convenience
is the key here. Rather than plugging in a bunch of devices to read
different memory cards, you now can use only one. For the sake of
argument, if you own a digital camera, and it uses CF cards, you
probably have a few cards kicking around. Naturally, one card will
likely always be in your camera, but you can use your extra ones
for portable storage. Then there are the digital cameras that need
to run on battery power to transfer images to your PC. Not all cameras
have docking stations, and others cannot operate with a power cable
plugged in, so to save on battery power, just pop the card out,
and into the reader.
Crucial
set out to make an attractive and portable card reader, and they
succeeded. Supporting six memory types, you can be comfortable knowing
that whatever memory you may have, this reader can probably handle
it.
Pros:
Good memory support, attractive appearance, compact.
Cons:
USB1.1, no extra USB jacks.
Bottom
Line: It's a little expensive, selling at about 50$ US, but
considering the overall package, and the typical Crucial quality,
it is actually quite a bargain. If you have any comments, be sure
to hit us up in our forums.
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