Card readers are generally lagging SD card development. Grievously lagging. A good deal of the problem is that USB2 just isn't fast enough to keep up with the transfer speeds the faster SD cards can achieve lately. Enter Transcend with this PCIe Express Card reader. With it, you will NOW see the full speed that your cards (probably the ones you've been complaining about) can deliver. Just for example, the latest SanDisk Extreme Pro cards claim 90MB/sec read speed. Well, in the built-in reader in my Dell Laptop (only a year and a half old) they most they'll do is about 15.5MB/sec write and 22MB/sec read. Yikes. In this Transcend reader, they deliver 100% full speed, about 45MB/sec write (yes!) and slightly higher than the claimed 90MB/sec read. Wow. That's seriously smokin fast. I went out with my D300s and shot 200 miscellaneous frames at 6/sec. The camera didn't slow down once. Then I transferred those 200 ~8MB files to a disk on my network server in about 20 seconds. Wow. That's the first time with any reader I've come anywhere close to those speeds. For the few $$ this thing costs, and assuming that you have a laptop that has an available Express Card slot, you shouldn't hesitate to add one of these adapters.

One minor note: The adapter won't be recognized in Windows unless you install the driver first. You have to visit Transcend's site to get that [Amazon won't let me put the URL to the driver here. You'll have to get it from the package insert where it's in rather tiny letters.] and then click on the ambiguous little flag in the upper right corner to localize. The driver sets up in Win 7 in a couple of seconds and doesn't require a reboot. Then when you plug in the adapter, you'll hear the "new device" sound, and cards you plug in will be automatically added to the list of drives.

And on a related subject, when you look at reviews for SD cards, particularly the latest high speed types, and the reviewer is complaining about the slow speed not meeting the spec, you can probably ignore those measurements and conclusions due to the fact that virtually ALL card readers are the speed limitation for the measurement. Especially anything that runs on USB2, which is technically too slow to keep up with any of the faster new cards. For example, I recently bought an inexpensive PQI 8GB Class 10 card for archival purposes. The speed measured out at 10/20 in the Dell internal card reader. In the Transcend, in the same Dell, it measured 16.7/23.3. That's quite a difference. Every other card I tested, except the very slowest/oldest was considerably faster in this Transcend reader.

Anyway, I highly recommend this for anyone using fast SD-XC or SD-UHS-1 cards in their cameras. You'll be very pleased at the much higher transfer speed than you've suffered with in your other readers.