Suggestions on SDHC Card Readers?
 

You guys using in USB II card readers that you recommend?

If anyone can suggest any firewire SDHC card readers too, that would be appreciated

To the OP: I got a USB SD card reader bundled with a Transcend Class 6 16GB SDHC card, which everyone seems to recommend. I haven't tried it out yet as I'm receiving it tomorrow, but it's a cheap alternative if you're going to buy a card anyway.

Link:

Hi Jonathan,

Each one I have (5 or 6 or them) all have the same read-write stats - approximately 18-20 Mb/sec. The limiting factor doesn't seem to be the reader, but rather the cards ability to transfer data. For that reason firewire isn't really going to give you any advantage either, other than to take less computing power to complete the transfer - like a few percentage points of the cpu's full capacity. Not a big deal. The speed will be the same. What has helped my workflow is to transfer two of more cards at one time with multiple readers. The drive's write speed is at least 3x's the SD card's read speed so it can easily keep up with what is coming in. The only snafu I've had is that one older reader won't allow you to write to the card, but transfers off are fine. I've written that off to the fact that its my oldest one - it either isn't meant for sdhc or the capacity of my cards is too large.

Thanks for the quick feedback guys.

Joel - I guess I was more curious on how well the reader works for transferring data without corruption than speed. I have used some in the past that have corrupted data or don't mount properly.

I got one of these
Lexar - Flash memory card readers - Pro CF Reader
and I'm well impressed with it.
It came highly recommended
Gavin

I wound up with 3 of those SanDisk MediaMate readers that were bundled with some 4 and 8GB Class (4) cards I bought for the Canon HF100's, and I used them until one day my son (an engineer with Dell in Austin) told me that any recent computer with a multimedia reader built in should handle SDHC just fine.

Both of my Dell XPS machines and a Dell laptop read the cards from the built in slot and that's what I've been doing ever since.

I still keep one of the little USB readers in each camera bag in case I get off somewhere and have to use an older computer to run files off to a CD or DVD disk.