Installation

You won’t spend long on this stage as you only have to plug in three cables and fasten four screws. With my Lian Li PCB-20 case, the black colour of the unit fits well with the front facia while making great use of the space.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Testing

To test the reader, I’ll be seeing how fast I can transfer photos from a Compact Flash disc with the Scythe reader, a Thermaltake Hardcano and a standard external card reader. All of these devices use the USB 2.0 protocol allowing for transfer speeds up to 480Mbits/s (60mb/s) although these figures are rarely reached even with the fastest hardware.

The photos that I choose to move where a group of 36, equally sized files amounting to 94.4mb overall. The Compact Flash card used was a small 256mb SanDisk ultra II which boasts a 10mb/s read speed meaning that the minimum time this transfer could take would be just short of 10 seconds.

As you can see, the Hardcano wipes the floor with the others, with the Scythe coming in next and the external reader a sad last place. While the Scythe is hardly lightening speeds, it does manage to transfer within a time that’s acceptable for most, and also has the added bonus of being able to use floppy disc’s. For those wondering, the floppy disc drive in the Scythe is able to write data at an awesome 35.5s per megabyte, or 0.03mb/s.