Kingston USB 3.0 Memory Card Reader FCR-HS3

USB 3.0 is not a new thing... Its been here for a while now. I have a lot of devices that utilize USB 3.0 but for my desktop I was always missing a Compact flash reader in the USB 3.0 variant. I would always be sitting at my desk offloading 64GB of photos and video to my computer and be wondering why is it that I dont have a USB 3.0 Compact flash reader? My card can certainly handle the speed, my patients can also handle the speed increase. So i jumped on amazon and picked this one up.First, Amazon is amazing, the shipping is very fast, the customer service is always there. It feels like you have a friend that owns a store and he will take care of you...Second upon receiving the Kingston's USB 3.0 Media Reader i opened it up and found the unit to be solid. The unit really felt solid in your hand. The unit comes with a USB 3.0 cord which is about 3 ft long. If that is long enough for you then your golden. However it wasn't long enough for me so I purchased a few 6 ft USB 3.0 extension cables. This is not a negative because most things need an extension cable anyway especially how my desk is set up.Third, I plugged the unit into my computer (Custom built PC) and the driver installed automatically. Only after a few minutes of receiving the package I was ready to go. Now it was time for a test. Luckly I had a fresh 64GB compact flash card filled with all kind of goodies from my camera. The files were comprised of Raw, Jpegs and some video files that range from 100MB to 4GB...The total size of everything was 57GB... The copying began. While I copied the files to my SSD I timed how long it took to copy all the files. It took 10 minutes and 50 seconds to copy 57GB from the compact flash card to my desktop. Simply amazing. That is an average of close to 90MB/Sec transfer speed.... I cant complain about that.I am very happy about my choice and after many Gigabytes of data transferred this Kingston's USB 3.0 Media Reader hits all the marks. Its Fast, Reliable, Sleek and stylish. It has a small footprint on my desk however its very powerful. If you have any doubts about this device I would suggest you rethink your thoughts. You can not go wrong with this!!!!

I had an older single purpose reader for compact flash, and lost it. Cheap. maybe 10 or 12 bucks, but it came with a mini USB cable. That was the best part about it. Recently I had need for another one, for company business, and found one at one of the larger office supply stores. Still cheap. I think I paid around 15 bucks. But it's all plastic, and simply feels flimsy, and cheap. In addition, the entire thing just plugs directly into a USB port, which I hate. One wrong move, and thats a lot of leverage to possibly damage your computers ports. I decided to keep it in the company camera bag, and try and find a better, quality unit, to keep with my laptop, where I hook it up to use it anyway. My thoughts were, that if the reader in the camera bag should fail, get damaged, lost, etc, I would have mine to use. I can tell you, I was extremely pleased when the Kingston unit arrived. All the USB ports in my laptop are USB 3.0, and so is this Kingston reader. So, nice match up there, and the transfer speeds are so much faster than the older 2.0 standard. It comes with a very useable 3 foot USB 3.0 cable, again, which I love for things like this, as it minimizes the possible damage that can occur if a direct plug in unit was hit, bumped, or something would fall on it while plugged in. The reader itself is of metal construction, and the fit and finish are superb. I tried it with various format cards, and they all fit perfectly. Not too tight, but they sure won't fall out of their slots on their own. I paid more for the Kingston than the previous two units I've had, but honestly feel it's worth every penny. If you use a card reader infrequently, have a reader built in to your laptop, like most do nowdays and don't need the capability to work with Compact Flash I, or II, then you probably don't need it. But if you have an older camera that still uses the Compact flash format, and want a high quality reader, then grab one of these. I don't think you will be disappointed. I'd buy one again, for sure.