Recommend an Internal Card Reader

[Ballatician]

So I've looked through NewEgg's many choices and none of them really stand out to me as being better than the other.

I'm looking for one that would read most of the plethora of flash memory (SD/xD etc), is internal and preferably black to match my case.

I don't need bells and whistles, just reliability and a nice look.

Thank you!

 

[Ballatician]

...

 

[hennessy1]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16820300608

 

[JackMDS]

I am using this one works well even with Vista. I do not think it does xD, it is hard to find these gizmos with xD capacity.

http://www.newegg.com/product/...x?item=N82E16811998814

 

[Chosonman]

Do Not buy the supertalent for $8 it's a piece of junk

I have the logisys and lain Li (matched my case) they are great.

 

[Zepper]

A card reader is a card reader - no need to fret over it.

This one looks to be OK.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16820176012

.bh.

 

[oscar6]

I've been happy with this one.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16820223076

 

[Zepper]

Doesn't look like the other buyers are particularly happy with it. Less than 50% 5-egg...

.bh.

 

[Ika]

I got a cheap one off eBay for $7 and it works fine. I use it for SD and xD cards. The USB port is 2.0, too.

 

[frostedflakes]

If speed isn't important any old reader should do. The cheap Rosewill I got off NewEgg doesn't seem to have any compatibility problems, but despite being advertised as USB 2.0, read/write speeds on my 150x SD are abysmal (like 1-2MB/s). The SD hooked up to USB through another device (camera, for example) reads at about 20MB/s, much closer to the rated speed. To be fair I haven't tried any other card formats, but I don't see why performance would be any different for them, it's all going through the same chip.

If you want good performance, you're probably going to have to look at higher-end readers. Or maybe low speed is just an inherent flaw of the all-in-one readers, I don't know.

 

[DaSinical1]

I would like to know this as well... I don't agree that card readers are card readers. The one that I bought... a generic one from fry's has a few quarks with it that I don't like. First, the leds on it stay on all the time. I would like one that the leds only turn on when a card in inserted. Second... it seems that I can't hook up any external hard drives when the card reader is installed. Whenever I plug a external usb hard drive... even a usb flash drive for that matter... I get an error. but that error goes away when I unlug the card reader.

 

[Zepper]

I solved my USB conflicts by using a self-powered USB hub - takes the load off the onboard ports and isolates the devices plugged into it a bit.

.bh.

 

[frostedflakes]

For anybody who's interested, I recently purchased an Atech Flash reader (the XM5U specifically) from NewEgg to replace my Rosewill RCR-102 (I recently discovered it didn't support SDHC, which was the last nail in the coffin for it). Anyways, this thing is great, my 150x cards read/write at the speed they're supposed to (~20MB/s) and it supports SDHC. And the thing is only like $5 more than the RCR-102, but is orders of magnitude better. I don't know how Rosewill can get away with selling such a crippled product for $15, at the time I bought it the reader wasn't the most expensive, but wasn't the cheapest either, so I had assumed it would be a decent quality product. Boy was I wrong, if the Atech readers cost $20 the Rosewill should be selling for about $5.