nad_masters's Full Review: Dynex (DX-CRD12) Card Reader
After purchasing a 4GB SDHC card, I found out that my laptop's built-in SD Card reader doesn't work with SDHC cards at all. My camera doesn't show up as a USB Mass Storage Device, so I can't coax it to work as a card reader, and my GPS writes way too slow to the card!
My friend's built-in card reader works with it, but skewed the test results when I found out that the write speeds were slower than what the card was capable of. So I needed a SDHC-compatible card reader. These readers are harder to find!
SanDisk makes a reader, but it only reads SD Cards (and their variants), Sony Memory Sticks, and Compact Flash (type I and II). It does not work with the older Smart Media (no big deal), nor xD (could be an issue since Fuji and Olympus uses them). Best Buy was selling it for $30.99. Best Buy also sell an in-store branded Dynex card reader that reads all of those types including a specific microSD slot, Smart Media, and xD. It was 6 bucks more, but I figure it was worth it for the xD and SM media compatibility.
In the Package
The package is one of those tough molded plastic that requires you to have a strong pair of shears to tear it open. It comes with a drivers CD which also have a few software (never used it), along with a ahort 2-feet mini-USB cable. Of course, the reader itself is present, which is a nice silver plastic square.
There is a warning sticker that covers up the SD Card slots that states that it needs to be inserted upside down. I found the warning to be untrue. You are suppose to insert them right side up! Maybe those hot coffee warnings are wrong too... I think I'll test that out tomorrow...
Design
The square plastic device looks pretty good. It's slightly curved in the middle, giving it a sleek hour-glass figure (mmm!). It's about 1.5" all around, and only a quarter inch thick. This makes the card reader perfect for the pocket, but remember to bring a mini-USB cable!
One side of the square have a mini USB jack. Two green LEDs adorn this side as well, which indicates power and activity. There is one side that doesn't have anything, but smooth silver plastic. The other two sides are adorn with slots for memory cards.
One one side, it accepts SD Cards, microSDs (yes, a dedicated microSD slot!), and Sony Memory Sticks. On the other side, it accepts Compact Flash media (various types), Smart Media cards, and xD cards.
The power LED is always on when you plug in your computer's USB. This indicates that the reader is receiving power and is on. The activity light is always on when a card is stuck in and detected. It blinks when you read or write to any of the cards.
In Use
When plugged in, 4 drive letters get added to My Computer in Windows. It seems that the microSD and standard SD Card slot share a drive letter, so you cannot use them both together. The SM and xD slot also share the same drive letter, though in their defense, they also share the same physical slot as well.
I was able to get a Sony Memory Stick and a SD Card working simultaneously.
I've tested several cards with this reader and found that the write speed is not hampered as much as other card readers I've used. This proved to me that some of the memory card benchmarks for the faster cards were bottle-necked. For example, the SanDisk Extreme III 2 GB SD Card as well as A-Data's microSDHC 4GB card. However, I am confident that my built-in laptop card reader was fine with slower cards, since the write speed seem to be capped at around 6 MB/sec at most, while some compatibility issues may have caused the 11 MB/sec A-Data card to only write at 2 MB/sec.
Conclusion
I am so used to cheap USB 2.0 multi-card readers bought at Fry's Electronics that paying nearly $40 for a card reader makes me feel like a sucker. However, I needed something that reads SDHC cards, and also not to bottleneck transfer speeds. I guess there is a price to pay when you need a good reader that works with SDHC cards.
Hopefully SDHC readers will become more of a commodity when SDHCs become more popular, which will reduce their prices.
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