Devices such as notebooks, mp3 players, pda's, digital cameras are commun toys these days. The capacity of their memory cards is growing bigger and bigger so the need for a solution that allows us to swap data in a quick manner grows along. Offcourse these devices can be attached to your computer using their internal connection, but mostly this is done using rather slow usb 1.1 or even serial ports.

Crucial offers a small and portable card reader that allows you to read and write your memory card info at lightning speed using usb2.0!




This compact card reader is only 64.9gr light and measures 10.1x7.6x1.45 centimeters! It supports seven different types of cards being Compact flash I/II, IBM Microdrive, Smartmedia, Multimedia, Memory stick and Memory stick pro.

What can you expect finding in the box when buying the CTR6ACPU2 as crucial named this device? First of all, a driver cd for all common used operating systems (not win xp since this has drivers build in), a leaflet with some basic instructions for using the card reader, an extension usb cable and the card reader itself.



Since the card reader was designed to be portable and thusfore might come across some dirty pockets it has a nifty little feature: the front can be closed so no dirt can get into the reader!





Another thing I liked a lot is is the way the cable is stored when not using the device. This way it doesn't take any place at all in your luggage and the risk of damaging the cable is non existing.



When in use, the cable has a nice pivot point so it wont crack either!

So, now you know what you get when buying this let's move on to the next page and run some speed tests...

The camera I used to make the pictures for this review and for comparision purposes was a Canon A70 equiped with a high speed professional Toshiba 128 MB CompactFlash card.

First of all, I shot 106 high resolutions pictures and uploaded and downloaded them to and from my computer, both with the camera's internal usb connection and with the card reader, cronograph in my hand...


This resulted in a quite funny graph:



As you can see the time difference between my camera and the Crucial card reader for performing the same actions is huge!

The release of SiSoft Sandra 2004 with the integrated benchmarking tool for removable storage/flash just came in handy for this review... However these results may vary since this benchmark is testing the CF card itself and not the card reader.



And again using the card reader gives us a hugh speed advantage!

Now, why should one buy this product? Moving data from a 16 or 32 mb memory card using onboard connections won't consume that much time but when you have a 128, 256 or even 512 mb memory card it could take quite some time doing so!

And to round up this review, my personal ups and downs for this device:

compact
hot swapable
"dust cover"
very fast

when opening "dust cover" I felt it was going to break every time again

This product can be ordered directly at crucial for the price of 25.84€/$25.99.
I'd like to thank Rachel Murray from crucial europe for sending me the review sample.

Commens and questions can be dropped of @ the Forums (no regis. required)

/biCker out