SilverStone SST-SDP01 6-in-1 Portable Card Reader

Installation:

The installation of the enclosure is fairly straightforward. You just attach one end the included USB cable to the header on the enclosure and the other end of the cable to the USB header on your motherboard. It doesn't really matter which end you use as long as you get the orientation of the plug right. When connecting the lose end of the cable, make sure the order of the color coded wiring matches the same order as the other end of the cable. Should you install it only to have trouble recognizing devices or get errors reading/writing, just double check the orientation and the order of the wiring.

The entire installation process took less than ten minutes. Here's a few pictures of the end result - I apologize if the pictures seem a bit dark.

Now that we're done with the installation, let's take a look at the reader's performance.

Test:

The SilverStone SST-SDP01 will be run against my good old reliable 6-in-1 USB1.1 reader from PQI. The test consists of copying 21.5MB of data from the reader onto a pair of Maxtor 120GB 7200RPM HDD's with 8MB cache running in RAID0 configuration (this would definitely take any read/write bandwidth issues from hard drive storage out of the equation). After the round of read tests, 21.5MB of data is written to the reader. Keep in mind that in the write test, the speed of the digital media (in this case a 64MB Smart Media card) also comes into play.

On the left, the reigning champion from PQI. One the right, the challenger from SilverStone.

Results:

To be honest, I never figured there'd be too much of a difference in the performance between the readers. The USB1.1 reader has always performed nicely. SilverStone put that thought to rest rather quickly.

The read portion of the test showed a staggering difference between the two readers with SilverStone coming out a full 86 seconds faster than the PQI - that's 92% less time than the PQI. When it came to writing, the SilverStone also came out ahead with 77 seconds less write time than the PQI - a difference of nearly 55%. I initially couldn't believe the read time difference and ran the read test 3 extra times with the same results. USB2.0 played a HUGE factor in transfer speeds giving the SilverStone SST-SDP01 a clear win in both read and write times.

Final Thoughts:

For such a young company, SilverStone hits the ground running. Their SST-SDP01 reader is a solid product offering both the convenience of having built-in reader, the portability of an external reader, and the flexibility of supporting every digital media under the sun. The USB port available in the front of the enclosure is a definite plus - I can NEVER have enough USB ports in the front of my case since I hate crawling around to the back of my PC to attach USB devices. The overall unit was very well constructed and easy to install. Thanks to the USB2.0 capability of the reader, the performance is absolutely wonderful.

This unit is definitely a fresh idea in a market where everyone is offering you the same flavors of vanilla, vanilla, and more vanilla. I highly recommend this unit for anyone looking for a quality reader with LOTs of functionality. This unit clearly deserves our PCA Award of Excellence.

• USB2.0 means fast transfers
• Enclosure provides flexibility
• 6-in-1 means you won't have problems using different media formats
• Solid construction

A big thanks to SilverStone Technology for sending the SST-SDP01 Reader over for review.