Digital Trends

Silverstone SDP01 Multi Card Reader

April 5th, 2004 | by Jeff Fila

If you require a portable reader, the device pops out of the 3.5-inch bay by a simple push of a button. Measuring just over 2¼ inches wide, 3¼ inches deep and 5/8 of an inch tall, the portable reader is compact enough to carry in a pocket and easily fits in a laptop or camera bag. A hide-away USB 2.0 cable pops out of the back of the unit, allowing you to plug it into an available USB port.

Two LEDs on the front of the unit light when the device is powered up and show activity when files are being transferred. The unit also features a USB 2.0 port on the front of the 3.5-inch panel, providing an additional front USB connection.

Shots of the SDP01: rear view, motherboard connection, USB port, and activity lights.

Testing and Use

Since we had several other media card readers on hand, we decided to compare transfer speeds of the Silverstone 6-in-1 reader to the other products. We tested it against the built in 4-in-1 reader on our Compaq Presario R3060 laptop, the Biostar E-Catcher external USB 6-in-1 reader, the internal Abit Media XP Pro 4-in-1 reader and the internal Chaintech CBOX3 six-in-one reader.

The Abit and Chaintech readers take up a whole 5.25-inch drive bay — which on many computer cases may be hard to give up. We liked the fact that the SDP01 goes in a 3.5-inch bay since many cases have two external 3.5-inch locations and only one is used.

We tested transfer speeds to and from a SanDisk 64MB compact flash card and an unbranded 64MB Multimedia Card, using the same 61MB file each time. Once we transferred the file and noted the times, we would delete the file and restart our computer to make sure to clean out the cache.

In our tests, the Silverstone internal reader performed well against the others. For the most part speeds were within a few seconds of each other, without any notable exceptions. As expected, read times were faster than write times and for the most part, the Compact Flash card was faster than the Multimedia Card.