The fastest Card reader

Hey guys I'm looking for the fastest card reader possible. usb / sata / esata. This will be for my desktop PC it can be internal or external but no firewire. I would like something that is hot-swap.

I was looking at this ( link too new egg ) which is a CF to 2.5" SATA adapter. Which would be great because I have a hot swap SATA drive bay for 2.5" drives. But I'm a bit worried about quality, so something like that would be fine too if you know of one.

Also it shouldn't be any issue but I would like it to work with Linux if possible, but I will take a windows only unit for the sake of speed.

Thanks for the opinions,
Phil

Alright guys, I'm going to pull the trigger on the one that I linked to. I'll let you know how it works when It get's here.

your post did not contain a link

That's odd original post should have had this in it.

http://www.newegg.com …aspx?Item=N82E1​6812186099

( amended original post. )

If you're running one of these externally, be sure to have a powered sata connection. Some of the computer cases (coolermaster cosmos s, etc) will not have a powered sata connector.

I'm running something similar to the reader that was linked...and it was exceedingly fast. A 16 gig Extreme Pro, fully loaded, transferred all it's info in about 4 minutes, 50 seconds. 16 gig Extreme IV, 45MB/s, transferred out in a bit over 6 minutes.

In comparison, my firewire 800 took 10 to 12 minutes and the USB 2.0 took well over 17 minutes.

PM01 wrote in post #11701940
I'm running something similar to the reader that was linked...and it was exceedingly fast. A 16 gig Extreme Pro, fully loaded, transferred all it's info in about 4 minutes, 50 seconds.

50MB/s - sounds quite good. Possibly reaching the limit at which data can be written to your HD.

PM01 wrote in post #11701940
In comparison, my firewire 800 took 10 to 12 minutes

Less than 25 MB/s sounds very, very slow for FW800.

maybe several different things are in play:
speed the card support a read process
speed of the reader itself (if UDMA 5 or 6 compliant it should be in the 100MBs range)
speed of the transport between reader and data destination (USB 2, FW 400, FW800, eSATA, PCI buss via express card reader, USB 3)
speed of the destination (typically a HD) to accept the incoming data


Using a Sandisk 60MBs card the faster I could get from any reader via USB 2 to my laptop HD was ~20MBs. Using the Lexar expresscard reader I got around 50MBs. I don't know which component is the bottleneck. But you can bet I am glad to get a 50% inprovement over USB 2!!!

I purchase an Addonics eSATA reader. The fastest I can get with it is around 30MBs. I was hoping it would deliver in the 50MBs range. On our laptop, that does not seem to be possible.

I have ordered a USB 3 reader from Taiwan. I will try it next week, if it is here then, when I have rebuilt the current desktop into a Sandy Brige machine with native USB 3 ports. At least initially the desktop will still have SATA II HDs. Perhaps a better test will be when the HDs are SATA III 7200 units. Then the card should most likely be the weak link.

I will post results as soon as the machine is rebuilt and the new reader arrives from Taiwan.