1.0 Introduction

The technology development within electronic accessories is strongly marked out by a considerable trend towards the meeting and interaction among devices: in this background an essential role is played by personal computers, due to their versatility. Actually the hardware and software evolution allows the processing and storing of data coming from different devices that have designs more and more often corresponding to the information world standards. One of them, the USB standard, marked a turning point out, allowing the starting of a rich designing and the diffusion, on a large scale, of many types of components or peripherals with reduced both dimensions and power consumption, and, at the same time, with a notable efficiency on both the performances - here on binary digit tranfer rate from and to the hosts they are connected to - and offered functionality, such as the high storing capacity and the easy informations portability.

The Crucial's Hi-Speed USB 12-in-1 card reader, is included in this type of class: this reader allows the meeting of different worlds, since you can get data, for storing and/or processing, from any computer that supports any USB standard, from the initial revision 1.1 (called Full-Speed USB as well, due to its 12MB/s tranfer rate) to the 2.0 (Hi-Speed USB, 480Mb/s). Data can be produced by a large and different (set of) sources - such as digital cameras, mobiles, PDAs, MP3s and multimedia readers - that use the so called flash memory cards to store informations.

Crucial's Hi-Speed USB 12-in-1 allows to connect such memories to computers and to interact with them as they were a removable hard drive. There are many fields where a card reader is very useful: generally in all those cases you want to store and catalogue the content of a digital media chip - like a Secure Digital on a digital camera - in a mass storage much bigger and handy (like harddisks, or cdroms or dvdroms).

Our analisys starts by summing up the reader's technical specifications, then looks over the device's physical features, we got some photos of the device, and, at last, gives the performances informations taken by measuring the main output parameters.

1.1 Technical Features

The Crucial's Hi-Speed USB 12-in-1 supports many different types of flash memory cards and that makes it very suitable in interfacing the calculators - both notebooks and desktops - with many mobile devices. There are no problems about its portability, as it just needs a motherboard with USB 1.1 connectors, or later revision, and any operating system that supports them. Then, it can be used with both Windows - you need to install the drivers only on Windows 98/98SE - and Macintosh.

Specifications

• Supports USB 2.0;

• Works with Microsoft Windows 98SE and higher and Mac OS 9.0 or higher (drivers required for Windows 98 SE);

• Size: 4.331 in. x 2.402 in. x 0.6299 in. (110mmx61mmx16mm);

• Plastic exterior;

• Drag files between memory card and computer;

• Card-to-card data transfer;

• No external power required;

• Supports hot-swapping Low power consumption.

The "Drag files between memory card" function allows you to transfer files from a memory card to another one, even different, when they are simultaneously plugged in the reader, while the "hot-swapping" does the replacement, as the reader is working, of a flash memory card with another one of the same type, without compromising its usability or integrity.

Compatibility with memory cards

This card reader has got 4 slots that can support 12 different types of flash memory cards. The whole list of them is below:

• Memory Stick;

• Memory Stick Pro;

• Memory Stick Pro Duo (needs a dedicated interface);

• Memory Stick Duo;

• Secure Digital;

• MiniSD;

• MultiMediaCard;

• RS MMC;

• Smart Media;

• Microdrive;

• CompactFlash Type I/II.

In the next page we will give a visual inspection of this reader.

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Visual Inspection

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