download speed card reader vs. pc slot

[Graham Welland]

The standard PC card slot is much slower than an external USB 2.0 card reader unless you use a cardbus reader such as the Delkin Cardbus 32. These are MUCH faster.

If you are using a PC then you'll get drivers with the adaptor that will work with your OS. For Mac, it's still very irritating that they don't have a 10.4 driver available yet, only up to Mac OS X 10.3.9 are supported at the moment.

[rabates]

I have a 80X Lexar 1gb CF card. My Lexar 2.0 multicard reader downloads 2.5x faster then the cf slot in my PC. The card reader is old the PC is only a few months old. The PC has a Mitsumi floppy drive/card reader(usb 2.0) Is this difference due to the fact that the older Lexar reader is able to take advantage of 80X and the newer PC slot is not? They  both usb 2.0. The same speed difference happens wheather I use Nikon Transfer or explorer.

[Jonathan Wienke]

The standard PC card slot is much slower than an external USB 2.0 card reader unless you use a cardbus reader such as the Delkin Cardbus 32. These are MUCH faster.

That's irrelevant if the card reader connects via USB 2.0, a CardBus connection is not involved. The speed difference is most likely due to the USB interface in each card reader; not all are created equal. The multicard + floppy device probably has a cheap controller to keep overall cost down, which degrades performance.