StarTech.com 3.5in Drive Bay IDE to Single CF SSD Adapter Card Reader, TAA (35BAYCF2IDE)

First and foremost, you can't go wrong with StarTech's products. They do amazing work and produce quality peripherals.I use SD cards all the time for photography and need a dedicated port on my PC for them. In the process of building a new PC, I realize no new (good) cases really come with an SD slot and if they do they are sketchy at best, so I needed something like this to add to a case that had expansion bays. With a 5.25" adapter from the same company, I was able to get this installed and working easily.The black color is great as it matches most modern cases. Since StarTech is based in North America, the experience of actually using this device is well thought out for a western mindset. The text labels makes sense, the design is intuitive, and—again—the quality is impeccable.Love that this supports the new UHS pins for next-gen SD cards on the left slot. I don't have any or devices that support them, but I bet I will someday and be happy not to have to get a different reader/adapter or settle for slower transfers. Because of the UHS SD slot, this technically has 2 full-size SD card slots which is super nice for transferring data between them or just pulling files from both simultaneously. The Micro SD slot is wonderful too (no adapters needed) and I appreciate the support for legacy CF and MS cards (though... TBH, I don't plan on ever using them). I really didn't need an additional USB port on the front, but I can see it being handy for many users.Lots of cheap imported media card readers seem like they use old technology and the fact that this is only one of a handful to use full USB 3 for all slots is kinda mind boggling. So many readers have a USB 3 header cable for the USB ports, but then utilize only USB 2 for the card reader part causing bottlenecks in transfer speed. Not to mention some of those other card readers cost basically just as much as this one!If you need a memory card reader, don't bother with the cheap crap out there unless you know you don't need the quality or speed. This one will provide top-notch transfer rates, great compatibility, and solid construction that I trust will last for years to come.

Bought this to read camera cards as part of my media processor/server. It seems to be the only 3.5in internal card reader that supports uhs-ii via USB3, and does that extremely well, reading at over 200MBps/1.6Gbps from a V60 card to an Asus ProArt MBO & M.2 SSD; though not quite as fast as the uhs-ii reader in my Dell laptop, that achieves 250MBps/2Gbps with the same cards. Just beware that the CF slot below the uhs-ii slot has no floor to it, so it is too easy to "post" a uhs-ii card in there and thence into the bottom of the card reader's case, which then requires careful retrieval with sticky tape on a flat, flexible stick: hence the tape & label on the CF slot in the picture above!

my server is used mainly for data storage over the network and so i like to have as many different ports as possible onto it to make it easy to rip physical media to my network attached storage. this lets me add card ports like microSD and regular SD to my server so no more need for dongles. i use a lot of SD cards and microSD cards. i like this device because all it requires is a single USB 3.0 header to power the whole multi-card reader. you do need to buy a separate adapter to let it fit into 5.25" bays tho keep that in mind.

I had a cheapo 3.5" bay card reader before, and it started causing tons of USB errors and slowing my computer down. I don't like using an external reader if I can avoid it, so I got this one as a replacement.It just works, it produces no errors, doesn't occasionally reset my USB bus, and the card orientation actually makes sense. It is "only" USB 2.0 but SD cards aren't really all that fast, so it's fine, and it doesn't use up one of those rare USB 3.0 headers.Generally everything Startech branded is good quality, but comes at a premium.

It works extremely well in that it does what it says, with one exception -- I DO have UHS-2 (with the second set of fingers) cards for my Canon R6Mk2, and the maximum transfer speed (to a nVME drive in my desktop) still maxes out around 90MB/sec.Now that's nothing to scream about, but its not the sort of transfer rate being claimed for some of these cards and, most-importantly, its not any different from putting the SAME card in the right-hand (no UHS-2 second set of pins support) slot.