| Keith Moreau |
February 22nd, 2009 07:42 PM |
The Express card standard supports both PCI and USB interfaces. The Sony SxS cards use PCI, that's how they can get such tremendous transfer rates (100MB /second). The Expresscard adapters, like what we use to allow us to use SDHC cards in the EX, use the Expresscard USB standard which tops out at around 20MB/second.
If you want something to offload a Sony SxS, you'll need a reader that supports the Expresscard PCI standard. There are I believe 1 or 2 that do but they are go into your PCI slots in your Mac or PC, and they don't work that well on a Mac yet. The ExpressCard readers that plug into a USB port will read the USB type Expresscard, of which the Sony SxS isn't (it's a PCI Expresscard - the fast kind).
I had the same desire to be able to offload my SxS cards to my Mac Pro, rather than always going through my MacBook Pro (which has an Expresscard reader built in) and inquired with this synchrotech.com, makers of Expresscard / USB readers, here is what they said:
"Sorry, nothing FireWire or USB that works with SxS cards. For the Mac Pro, we have a PCIe to ExpressCard reader that works with SxS cards, but OS X doesn't implement PCIe hot swap on non-MacBook Pro machines. In other words, you would need to reboot the machine every time you want to read a new SxS card."
If you find one let me know though.
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