Lexar Professional Express Card Compact Flash Reader LRWEXPPRBNA

by Lexar

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 5 x 1 inches ; 2.4 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Shipping: Currently, item can be shipped only within the U.S.
• ASIN: B0036VO6OQ
• Item model number: LRWEXPPRBNA
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
  • #83 in Electronics > Computers & Add-Ons > Computer Accessories > Memory Card Readers
• Date first available at Amazon.com: February 2, 2010

Product Description

High-Speed Reader for All Photographers Lexar offers high-performance UDMA CompactFlash readers designed to help advanced photo enthusiasts optimize their post-production workflow speed. These readers are designed for use with high-speed cards, and provide incredibly fast download speeds when paired with a UDMA card. Designed for photographers on the go, the Lexar Professional ExpressCard CompactFlash (CF) Reader is compatible with CF and UDMA CF memory cards, and it leverages UDMA 6 technology to deliver impressive, industry-leading transfer speeds-up to 133MB/s.* Designed for Ultimate Performance   Save Time and Drastically Improve Workflow. Designed to leverage the industry-leading speed of the Lexar Professional 600x CF card or other high-speed UDMA card, the Lexar Professional ExpressCard CompactFlash Reader provides blazing fast transfer speeds from card to computer-up to a blistering 133MB per second. Simply plug it into the ExpressCard slot of your laptop and the reader connects directly to the high-speed PCIe bus interface for enhanced performance. Convenient Portability for Photographers on the Go. The Lexar Professional ExpressCard CompactFlash Reader is designed for photographers who think outside the studio. This convenient and portable reader works with your MacBook Pro computer or PC notebook with a 54mm or 34mm ExpressCard slot, making it an excellent choice for photographers. The reader also boasts an extra-deep card slot for less card exposure, which helps protect your card against bumps, dislodging, and physical damage. The design also provides card stability and prevents any shifting during reading. Enhance Your Business. When used in conjunction with a UDMA CF card, the reader’s high-speed performance allows you to drastically accelerate transfer speeds from card to computer-saving you time and money. The reader also comes with free, dedicated customer support and is backed by a two-year limited warranty. Lexar. When Memory Matters.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Finally, a stable CF reader for your MacBook Pro's Expresscard slot!, April 30, 2010

By 

Jeffrey Few (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Lexar Professional Express Card Compact Flash Reader LRWEXPPRBNA (Personal Computers)

Before purchasing Lexar's new Expresscard CF reader, I was skeptical that this model would be any better some of the previous attempts by other vendors. These devices historically have worked very poorly, on Mac notebooks in particular. Many of the reviews mention kernel panics after merely plugging the card into the slot!

Lexar's reputation for quality products led me to finally try to replace my Firewire 400 CF reader (also by Lexar) with one of these, and so far I haven't been disappointed.

I did an apples-to-apples comparison of my new Expresscard CF reader versus the Firewire 400 (chained via my Iomega Ego triple interface external HD to the MacBookPro's FW 800 port). My Transcend 133X 32GB CF card contained 548 Canon RAW images weighing in at just under 15 GB. For this test, they were copied to my MBP's internal SATA drive.

The results? The Expresscard reader copied these images in 6:57 (or 35 MB/sec average throughput) versus the Firewire 800 reader in 16:57 (or 14 MB/sec average throughput) for an improvement of 2.5X!

Anecdotally I'd say performance of the Expresscard reader is on par with the Firewire 800 card readers I've used, but I've only got one FW800 port on my MBP, which is often being used by my external HD. Unless you dedicate your Expresscard slot to some other purpose (or don't have one), I see no reason to buy a slow, bulky USB or Firewire card reader with this faster, less expensive option available.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars UPDATE: You must install a driver, plus transfer time test results, August 6, 2010

By 

Terry Hansen - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Lexar Professional Express Card Compact Flash Reader LRWEXPPRBNA (Personal Computers)

UPDATE 8/11/10:
Disregard my original review (left intact below) as everything seems to be OK now. I did not realize I needed to install a driver on my Mac to use this reader. NO DRIVER COMES IN THE RETAIL PACKAGE. Indeed, all there is is a small, easy to overlook (well, I did not notice it) sticker with the world's tiniest print instructing you to download the not-included driver.

Only after a call to tech support did I realize I needed to go online and get the missing driver. I did, and all now seems well. If anything, not only is it not crashing, but it seems to be reading the CF cards even faster. I have now upgraded my rating from 1 to 4 stars; I withhold a 5 star rating only because the REQUIRED driver is NOT included in the retail package. (And, yes, I realize drivers need to be updated periodically, but not including any driver at all is still a questionable decision by Lexar.)

Now that the driver issue has been resolved, here are some transfer time test results, comparing this ExpressCard reader to Lexar's own CompactFlash FireWire 800 reader. Two different CF cards were used, as indicated. CPU was a MacBook Pro, 17" Intel Core i7, 500GB SSD drive (with a lot of unused space on it), connecting via FireWire 800 port or ExpressCard slot as appropriate (and no other devices attached). Each test was performed twice, with the average transfer time posted below.

TEST ONE:
Lexar 600x UDMA CF card, 16GB, with 9.93 GB of photo data

using Lexar's CompactFlash FireWire 800 Reader:
133 seconds
using Lexar's ExpressCard CompactFlash Reader:
132 seconds

TEST TWO:
Lexar 300x UDMA CF card, 16GB, with 15.94 GB of photo data

using Lexar's CompactFlash FireWire 800 Reader:
339 seconds
using Lexar's ExpressCard CompactFlash Reader:
351 seconds

CONCLUSION:
While this ExpressCard reader is fast, it is no faster than Lexar's own FireWire 800 card reader connected via a FW 800 port (and, with 300x speed media, was actually just slightly slower). However, using the ExpressCard reader does free up the FireWire 800 bus for other purposes, such as for attaching external FW 800 drives, a not insignificant possible advantage. On the other hand, if you prefer to use the ExpressCard slot for other purposes, such as an eSATA card to attach eSATA drives, then the older Lexar FireWire 800 reader is an equally speedy choice to use instead of this newer ExpressCard reader.

-------------------

ORIGINAL REVIEW:
In a word: TERRIBLE!

I had extremely high hopes for this reader, but, out of 6 attempts to use it, my MacBook Pro hard crashed 3 times, i.e., kernel panics, requiring repairing and rebooting. The 3 times that it worked without crashing my Mac, it was indeed fast. But I cannot excuse such incredibly poor behavior, not to mention the resulting damage to my system software (and, yes, after each kernel panic, Disk Utility reported that there had been corruption that needed to be repaired).

FYI: MacBook Pro 17" 2.66 GHz Intel Core i7, OS 10.6.3, 8 GB RAM

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Price and performace = MAX, August 24, 2010

By 

Photo Guy "overfocusedDOTsmugmugDOTcom" (Illinois) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Lexar Professional Express Card Compact Flash Reader LRWEXPPRBNA (Personal Computers)

I currently have a laptop with 2 Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB 7200 RPM hard drives in a RAID 0 stripe, and this reader maxes out! Currently I read at 60-85MB/second on average with a Lexar 16GB 600x memory card depending on the kinds of files, and my hard drives can't write any faster! I love Lexar for 1 reason: Their products actually work as they are labeled!

On a side note: I use Windows 7 x64