Recently I decided to stop adding more individual card readers to my growing collection wired gadgets, and go for an “all in one” reader. As I sit here looking at this thing in my hand, I realize that while it resembles a floppy in its size and shape, there is a large amount of history that has been lost between the floppy and this device. A floppy disk was a fairly standard method for file exchange/transport. Now that the need for large capacity storage has come about so quickly, it would appear that any hope of ever getting back to anything “standardized” is fading fast. For most uses there is no advantage to using one type of card over another. I can see why CompactFlash is no longer used for digital cameras that much, but there is still a great amount of similarity between all of the medias availible. My old digital camera will write an image in about 5 seconds, this is due to limitations with both the media and the camera, but my new camera will write an image in less time than it takes you to blink, but still slower than the ability of its media, which has theoretical limits of 9 MB/s for reading and 10 MB/s for writing.
With the new device I purchased to consolidate all of my mess into a single form I find only a few disappointments. The first major disappointment is that each media has its own way of being inserted because of the design for handling multiple media types per bay. The next thing that bothers me is that the bays aren’t recessed far enough, because all of my cards stick out really far and this would require me to leave my computer’s case door open when the media is in the bay because of a lack of clearance.