VR-Zone

Card readers don't tend to be all that exciting these days, mostly because they all do the same job and perform about the same. Not so with the new CR-8600 from PhotoFast which is one of the first multi-format USB 3.0 card readers to hit the market. It offers three to four times the performance of the best USB 3.0 card readers with current generation memory cards and will potentially offer even better performance with faster memory cards.

The CR-8600 supports all standard memory card formats such as CompactFlash, SD, SDHC, SDXC, Memory Stick, HS Memory Stick, Memory Stick XC and the various mini and micro formats of the SD and Memory Stick cards. So far PhotoFast has tested it with a range of the latest generation of memory cards and have reached read speeds of 96.75MB/s and write speeds of 67.73MB/s using a CompactFlash UDMA 7 card, read speeds of 84MB/s and write speeds of 48.24MB/s using an SDXC USH-I card and finally read speeds of 43.18MB/s and write speeds of 43MB/s using a Memory Stick Pro-HG card.

Judging by these numbers it's pretty clear that a USB 3.0 card reader makes sense for those using the latest generation of memory cards with their digital cameras and camcorders as the same UDMA 7 CompactFlash card only mustered 34MB/s read and 33MB/s write performance using a USB 2.0 card reader. The CR-8600 should hit retail sometime in March with worldwide availability and a retail price of around US$30.

Source: Photofast