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This was actually exactly what I was looking for. I am not a fan of external devices with their clutter and I wanted a compact flash reader that fit above the floppy drive in a 3.5" bay. Well, here is a Teac FD-CR7 combo floppy drive that includes also card reader slots compatible with Compact Flash (CF), Micro drive, Secure Digital (SD) / MultiMediaCard (MMC) and Memory Stick (MS) and you get to keep the second 3.5" bay for other uses. |
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Below you can see the rear of the FD-CR7 where there is a standard floppy connector and standard floppy power connector. There is also an internal usb connector that you connect directly to a usb header on your motherboard and it allows access to the card slots at the high speed usb 2.0. They could have made the mistake of using the slow floppy cable to access the cards but Teac very cleverly included a usb connection. The unit will work without the floppy cable attached also.
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Below you can see the usb connector which is a 4 pin type. You must be careful that the pinout matches that of your motherboard so you will need to get out the motherboard manual and check it with the pinout which is written on the connector. The pinout is red (power), white (D-), Green (D+) and Black (Ground). |
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The pinout matched my intel motherboard D875PBZLK and so i connected the cables and powered up. The device was immediately recognised by Windows XP and installed automatically without disks, it gave two new removable drives in my computer and i could hot plug and remove a compact flash card without the OS complaining. The transfer rates appeared to be very good with compact flash. I did not have any other cards to test the device. The only other card which I had was an XD card which is not supported on this device. I use Compact Flash almost 100% of the time so that was not an issue for me. The good thing is that if the floppy mechanism eventually gets trashed as they do, you will still have a fully working card reader and not a worthless unit for the garbage.
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After a few months the floppy broke but I still use it as a card reader. Actually there has never been a problem with compatibility, the FD-CR7 even reads some SD cards that a Sandisk unit I have in the office does not. |
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Sometimes there is a driver problem with the FD-CR7 however and this occurs on both windows 2000 and XP however it happens very rarely. The unit becomes completely inaccessible and requires a reinstall of the drivers from the Teac site. This can be rather annoying and require several reboots and reinstalls before it starts working again. Unfortunately this kind of problem is common with USB devices and not something specific to the FD-CR7. Price is about 35 euro which is reasonable. |
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