does this transfer the footge off sxs faster than going from camera directly?

Jim,
I know very few people who transfer directly from the camera. Personally I use laptops with Expresscard34 slots for the SxS card, and have an SBAC-US10 reader for my desktop. From what I've heard, transferring off the camera may be slower, but what it certainly does is tie up the camera, which would never work in my workflow.
I did some transfers today with the SBAC-US10 through my desktop PC onto an external USB2 drive, and had a throughput speed of about 27 or 28MB/sec. (rough computation - just over 1.5 GB per minute). That means a 32GB card in about 20 minutes. Of course with USB2, your processor speed may be a factor, not to mention the speed of the drive that you're transferring to.

thanks dave,
btw, i have usb3.0 on my system, i take it the reader isnt 3.0 fast, only goes to 2.0

The SBAC-US10 is USB 2.

If you don't have a laptop with express card slot then the only fast options are to use the Sony PHU-MS240 connected via eSata as a card reader or the Sonnet QiO if your a Mac user.

The QiO is about twice the price of the US10, but worth it if your doing a lot of transfers, it's very fast.

limited budget,
so the sbac is no faster than transferring off the camera directly?

I happen to have an SxS card with some data from my last shoot and some time to run a test. Here's the results on my MacBook Pro: MacOS 10.5.8, Intel 2.5GHz Core Duo, 5400RPM Hitachi 250GB drive with 30GB free

Data size copied in the test: 3.893 GB
Methodology: XDCAM Browser drag and drop to a new folder on the internal MacBook Pro hard drive

Results in mm:ss
PMW-EX1R: 03:50
SBAC-US10: 04:30
Express Card Slot: 02:25

thanks les,
glad i saw this.im better off just going out of camera, waste of money getting the sbac
wish my dell laptop had the slot

Unless you are only off loading to the internal drive, more often than not the laptops slot advantage is lost as you have to use a USB 2 hard drive. Some of the newer PC laptops with USB 3 are going to allow you to have very fast transfers.

Again this is where the QiO comes into it's own as it also has esata ports of fast hard drives.

Honestly, there's a good argument for using the camera to transfer.

On the one hand, it's a pain to drag the camera into the editing suite.

On the other hand, you'll never forget the SxS cards when you leave for a shoot. (can't tell you how many times I've left them in the edit suite by accident)

Yes, the USB reader is faster:
you can leave it where it is,
you don't have to get it out of your camerabag/case,
you don't have to 'find' the gate for the usb ,
you don't have to make room for the camera to transfer data,
you don't have to power your camera,
and you can use it while the camera is somewhere else :-p

So, the transfer speed may be the same, the speedgain is in all the other things.
And it's convenient :-)

This same question has been asked before.... or is this not a deju-va (and did I get a glipse of the future a few months ago? ;-) )