USB Card Reader Hell

I always hate buying USB Card Reader simply because it rarely work consistently on all machine, and it was no exception last night as I brought a card reader for my teacher as part of a birthday gift set.

The Card Reader cost HK$25, so I don't even expect specular performance. Since my teacher only use SD card, so I tested intensely, and found that the SD card reading part works pretty OK. I tried old school 128Mb memory stick and it also worked pretty well. But the Memory Stick Pro Duo had such a huge problem. For instance, it has problem reading my 512Mb SanDisk Memorystick Pro Duo. It happened on all the machine that I tested with. It also happened when even when I put the Pro Duo card in the Memory Closure. In addition, after the system confused by the Pro Duo card, the card reader was rendered into useless.


Also, the card reader confused my other connected removable harddisk on the system. Sigh.

So, I will not buy stuff from that brand ever.


On the plus side, I found a HK$29 card reader that is:
- Bootable
- Can support Memory Stick and Memory Stick Pro Duo
- Works with SD.

This is such an awesome device, since it turned my left over memory stick into a useful bootable thumb drive.


Tidbit:
- Flash drive takes more time to WRITE than read.