Kingston has joined the ranks of USRobotics and Lexar with its launch of a new USB 3.0 memory card reader that transfers data among CF, SD, microSD, and Memory Stick formats. The new card reader should be available soon at an initial retail price of $45.00. Check availability on Amazon.com.
For those unfamiliar with USB 3.0, it’s much faster than USB 2.0 and even FireWire. USB 3.0 offers the potential of 5Gbps data transfer rates; however, that isn’t a realistic data rate for memory card to hard drive transfers because of the bottleneck of the memory card and hard drive speed limitations. Although, it will remove one piece of the bottleneck from your data pipeline if you’re still stuck on USB 2.0.
Now, if we could just get our Thunderbolt accessories . . . . I hope they aren’t going to be a long-time coming as we’ve seen with USB 3.0 accessories. While we’ve had USB 3.0 hard drives for many months (and prices are rather low), other USB 3.0 peripherals (e.g., card readers, hubs, etc.) have just recently been trickling into the market.
