Miscelleneous by stefan @ 2010-12-17
The E3 Card Reader is a multi-function device, with 4MB Flash onboard, that can be used for reading/writing to microSDHC cards, but also has the posibility to enable the PS3 load homebrew software and backups.
At first I would like to thank E3card-china.com for offering me a sample of their e3 Card Reader for review.
E3card Reader is a personal mass-storage security assistant. It works as a multi-function SD card reader for users. It’s your own file security expert. In basic mode, a normal SD card once accessed by the E3card reader will not recognize by normal PCs or other normal card readers. For meeting various requirements coming from different kinds of customers, lots of encryption algorithm will be released and all of them are easy to download from our official website. In general, from preschooler to senior, if you have digital security requirement, the E3 would be the best choice.
Our products are easy to upgrade. Even for children (DO NOT let children under 6-years-older use this product, as they could accidentally eat the card reader and/or the SD cards) they just need to copy a file into a removable driver which named E3Upgrader by a simply Drag-and-Drop access, and then everything is done.
Drag-and-Drop is a well accepted standard used by most of the desktop-based operation-system such as Windows, Mac OS (coming from Apple) and lots of Linux system. No dedicated application need to download, No complex access need to learn, and No differences among different environments, to accomplish these objects, using the Drag-and-Drop upgrading mode seems to be the only way for us to make a very friendly tools for our precious customers.
Armed with an internal 4M memory stick, the ability to read/write various type of SD cards, E3 team have been trying to supply more and more functions but not only the personal file security services. We have licensing some impressive teams to get lots of good works available for our customer. And we welcome teams all around world to join us to create an exciting product. About the third-party application, please refer to our official website www.e3-card.com
E3 makes Everything Easy and Efficient.
32bit processor with 128K flash, has strong processing rate and high expand space.
MicroSD SDHC supported and can load software and game from it.
Multi-System supported and includes WinXP/Vista/Win7/Mac OS/Linux. This means you can upgrade and use E3 Card Reader in most OS.
4MB FLASH on-board, so you can save any PS3 software very conveniently. For example, you can copy any homebrew application.
Super-Drag-Plug upgrade mode. Just copy BIN file and paste into E3 Card, finishes upgrading in 1 second. No need for any extra upgrader.
Dual firmware booting mode. The latest Hermes v4b and KaKaRoTo firmware is integrated into one code and you can use any of them by yourself. No need to re-flash code.
Supports any free PSGroove files like Hermes & KaKaRoTo.
E3 Card Reader has CE, FCC and RoHS certification. It is a safer and environmental product and comes with 2 year warranty.
The E3 card reader looks like an USB Flash drive and has a white body and a grey plastic cap (it imitates a little the shape of an Ipod Shuffle); on the frontal part we can see the name of the product listed and its main function:
On its back, we can see the list of compatible operating systems:
If we remove the protective cap, we can reveal the USB connector:
On the bottom of the device, we can find the place to insert the microSD/SDHC card; also, we can see on the left and on the right SMD LEDs that light up depending in which state the device is in:
Right after connecting the E3 Card Reader to a spare USB port, 3 drives will show up in Explorer. The first drive may or may not appear with a label; in case it appears with a label, it will be E3_4M_STICK and it has a total of 4MB free space. This drive may be used for uploading small text documents or other software (like homebrew for the PS3).
The second drive is labeled E3Upgrader, does have only 128KB and it is meant only for flashing the reader with a new firmware from the E3 China website; they are constantly updating the website and offer the E3 Card owners the latest available firmwares; the latest firmware is a dual-boot one, which means that it can load two different payloads (Hermes when there is no microSD card into the reader and Kakaroto with a card loaded into it). This is a good thing because we do not have to flash the device every time when we want to switch from one payload to another.
The third drive is available only when a microSD card is loaded into the device:
Upgrading the device firmware is extremely easy and does not need extra software; we only have to drag and drop the file we have picked up from the E3 website to the E3Upgrader drive:
After the firmware flash is completed, we can see the blue LED light up in the back of the device:
When testing the internal 4MB flash with HD Tune Pro, we can see that it gets speeds near USB 1.0:
The copy and read speeds of the microSD card, when inserted into the E3 Card Reader are much lower compared to when using an aftermarket adapter (SDHC to microSDHC):
The E3 Card Reader is an interesting 2-in-1 device because we can use it as a microSDHC card reader, but also to flash it with payloads to be able to load homebrew (which now is growing fast) into our PS3. The device does not look as a cheaply built product and it is very easy to use after we read the instructions carefully.
All the software needed is available on the E3 China website and it is updated frequently with the latest version.
Of course, this product does also have some disadvantages: the included 4MB internal flash can be small for future homebrew packages (but the manufacturers have this covered -> we can place the software on the microSD card). Also, the read/write speeds of the microSD card are much lower than using a simple card reader.
I would like to thank again to E3 Card China for offering me a sample of this product for review!