Drugwash, on Mar 15 2009, 03:30 PM, said:
I got a takeMS 64-in-1 USB 2.0 multi card reader/writer and it works fine with NUSB 3.3.
Doesn't come with any drivers at all.
Shows up as 5 removable drives and it's a PITA to remove all of them one by one through NUSB.
The safely-remove-utility of nusb3.3 has a problem with multi-card readers: having to safely-remove 5 drives, one after the other, takes nearly as much time as a simple reboot. The manufacturer-provided driver by Genesys, for example, does this with a single removal selection from the system tray: "Stop Genesys USB Mass Storage Device J,K,L,M".
Another issue of nusb3.3 with card readers with several drive letters is that nusb3.3 does not indicate in My Computer which drive-letter actually contains the inserted card. The manufacturer-provided driver by Genesys, on the other hand, has 2-state-icons in My Computer, red when the card is inserted, grey when no card is inserted; this also identifies in red which of the several drive-letters of the multi-card reader I should double-click to open. Also, the 4 drive icons of the multi-card reader in My Computer are marked CF, SM, SD and MS, according to card type.
The discussion nusb vs. manufacturer-provided drivers is comparable to the discussion of printer etc drivers 10 years ago (compare p.812 in Minasi's Expert Guide to Windows 98, "Printer Drivers: Use the Manufacturer's or the Ones in Windows 98?")
In general I don't like multi-card readers which assign a separate drive-letter to each slot, it's a waste and clutters My Computer. If you use the card reader constantly, maybe you might consider a single-card reader just for the specific card type you use.
I do use one multi-card reader as a special-purpose device. I have a hama/EasyLine 55745 multi-card reader with a built-in hub, which I have been using as a dedicated eMule download station, without any problems, for 24-hours a day during the last 3 months. This eMule download station is similar to a solid-state drive (SSD), but with removable media (3 SDHC cards) so that I can remove the SDHC card containing the completed downloads, without the need to stop eMule. I have a 16GB SDHC card in a card-slot of the multi-card reader plus 2 single-slot SDHC card readers at the USB connectors of the built-in hub, altogether 48GB (3 SDHC cards) for eMule incoming+multiple temporary directories.
Typical eMule uptime with this dedicated SDHC download station has increased under Win98SE by about 1 day over an internal HDD, to 3 days 10 hours +-2hours. So physical read-write issues of HDDs definitely contribute to eMule crashes under Win98SE. I haven't figured out yet why my eMule v0.49b under Win98 on the download station with SDHC cards crashes regularly after about 3 days 10 hours.
This post has been edited by Multibooter: 16 March 2009 - 01:05 AM