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These days we all use flash memory cards in some form or other whether it’s for a digital camera, mobile phone or another similar device. So it’s useful to have a reader built into your desktop PC and the Akasa AK-ICR-01B is a no-frills one of these designed for an external 3.5″ drive bay. |
Introduction
There are several internal card readers available on the market but most of them are either unbranded/shop rebadged or they are fancy versions with added fan control and extra bits and pieces and need to be fitted into a 5.25″ bay. If you want a branded 3.5″ simple reader then your choices are a little more limited. This Akasa product is just one of those.
The reader I’m reviewing today is a simple black faced four slot reader with an additional USB port and two LEDs – Green shows that the unit is powered up and Red shows that data transfer is occuring. Through using the four slots, Akasa has managed to make this device compatible with 30 types of memory card, although most of these are just alternative versions of each other rather than being distinctly different cards.
Packaging and Contents
My card reader is actually an OEM version (AK-ICR-01EB) and so comes as a bare card reader and a set of four screws. From the product details on the Akasa website it seems that the AK-ICR-01B full retail product comes with dual interchangable face plates for both black and white and also an instruction leaflet.
Being an OEM version the product just arrived in a layer of bubble wrap, i.e. no cardboard box etc. This helps keep costs down for OEM partners and reduces waste.
Installation
Installing this reader into a standard PC is a fairly easy procedure. You need to free up a 3.5″ external bay by removing the blanking plate and then slide the reader into the slot. The reader can then be secured using the screws supplied. Internally you then need to connect the cable from the card reader to an available USB pin header, the connector is keyed so that it can only go on one way round. Power is taken from the USB header to power the reader and it’s LEDs.
Clearly the card slots run down one of the USB channels and the spare channel is brought forward to the reader as a standard USB A socket for easy access from the front of your PC. The cable on the reader is 540mm at full stretch by my measuring. This is after the cable has spent a long time folded and tied in it’s packet so straightened out fully it might be a little longer. But certainly if you have a large case and your motherboard USB headers aren’t too well positioned then you might find it difficult to get this to reach.
Performance/Use
In terms of the insertion and removal of the memory cards this is an absolutely no frills affair. All cards must be manually inserted and removed, there’s no spring loaded removal of SD cards or eject buttons for CF cards like commonly found on portable devices such as mobile phones. All the cards do stick out quite a long way while inserted though so there should be plenty to grab hold of when pulling them out again. The upper slots require the cards to be inserted ‘contact side’ down i.e. right way up and the lower slots require the contacts to be facing up i.e. upside down.
The features of this reader include being able to read from one card while writing to another, this obviously could be a useful feature. This is however limited to cards that fit different slots, you cannot do this with all 30 different types of card supported as many use the same slots, so no reading from SD and writing to MMC for example. The cards locate well into the slots and make good contact so there shouldn’t be any worries about loosing connections part way through writing to card.
As far as MB/s read and write performance goes, this is quite hard to judge as the performance is related to the speed of the motherboard’s USB and the speed of the card being accessed. However I did decide to do a few simple read tests with HDTune just to make sure that it wasn’t slower than it should be. I also did comparison tests with my old unbranded card reader. The Akasa reader supports SDHC which the old reader doesn’t, so I only have results for SDHC on the new Akasa reader. As well as the 16GB SDHC card I also used an older 1GB standard SD card which was by far the slowest card, a 4GB CF card and a 2GB USB memory stick.
As you can see the results are mostly the same except for with the CF card where the old reader is sigificantly slower. I think however this might just be a quirk relating to my CF card as it tends to be unusually slow in some of my other devices, e.g. my iPaq 214.
Conclusion
Simple, cheap but effective. If all you want is a no frills card reader to fit into your desktop PC case then this is a good product to buy. Getting the OEM version further reduces costs by doing away with unnecessary packaging and instructions. It would be nice to have some eject mechanisms built into the reader but these aren’t absolutely necessary and would increase the cost of the product.
I’m not going to get overly excited about this because after all it is only a simple flash memory card reader but I will still recommend it as a product that you won’t regret buying. It’s cheap, simple and yet supports all the required features like hot-swapping, direct card to card transfers and SDHC cards.
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Overall Score: 7/10
Popularity: 8% [?]
15 Responses
I recently purchased this card (£10 from PC World). My PC is an old Dell Dimension 8200 with a USB 1.0 Motherboard therefore it does not have a nine-pin USB connection (described as “Compliant with USB 2.0 mainboard connection”). However I have installed a PCI USB 2.0 card which gives me 4 external USB 2.0 ports and 1 internal USB port with a 4 pin (Male) block. Is there any way I can connect this to my USB 2.0 Card ? Will this do the job…
http://linitx.com/viewproduct.php?prodid=10805
I guess I need something like this ??
Posted on October 31st, 2009 at 5:21 pm
USB 1 and 2 should both use the same nine-pin motherboard header but Dell are renowned for only supplying the absolute minimum when it comes to motherboards. They have them custom built and cut down on anything that’s not absolutely necessary.
The PCI card you describe sounds like it offers 4 x external USB ports and the same port internally (i.e. standard USB A socket). If so then the you’ll need this adapter rather than the one you’ve linked to which is for connecting a 9-pin USB to a EPIA motherboard which uses a smaller header.
You’ll need two of the adapters to do the job properly, this will give you 2 x 5 pins and by removing one of the ground pins it will leave you with the 9-pin connection that you need. You could do it with one adapter and just connect into one side of the card reader but you’d loose part of the card reader function (either cards or USB port). Obviously if you go for the two adapters option then you’ll need to route one of the cables out to an external USB socket as you have only one internal on the PCI card. You could remove a backpanel PCI blanking plate to do this.
Posted on October 31st, 2009 at 8:38 pm
Hi, I purchased the cable and it worked ! it read the USB port when I connected it to one side of the reader’s pins and deteched 4 new ports when I connected it to the other side.
My problem now is the internal port on my USB 2.0 card does not work, and I would need 2 anyway so I will have to get a USB 2.0 PCI card with 2 internal ports (that work !) and another cable.
But thanks for the great advice.
Posted on November 14th, 2009 at 6:03 pm
Glad to be helpful. Yes you would need to have two USB (A) sockets to attach two cables which means that you’d need to either route the cables through the back panel of the case to the inside or buy a PCI card that offers two internal USB (A) sockets.
Something like this one – USB 2.0 Hi Speed 6 Port PCI Adapter Expansion Card for example. And from reading the review it seems that it works with the drivers that already exist in Windows but it doesn’t come with any screws.
Posted on November 14th, 2009 at 7:17 pm
OK, I have a USB 2.0 PCI card with 2 internal ports and 2 USB cables. The USB card is installed. If I connect the card reader to the internal ports nothing happens. If I connect them to the rear external ports then it recognises I have a card reader. I know the internal ports are working because I can connect a USB memory stick to both internal ports. So whats the differance between the 2 internal and 4 external ports on this PCI Card ?
Posted on November 19th, 2009 at 10:38 am
I would expect them to all work the same. However it may be that the internal ports are mapped to the same addresses as two of the external ports such that the internals cannot be used while the equivalent externals are in use but I assume you’ve tried with just the internals connected.
Alternatively it may be that the internals aren’t powered USB and the externals are, in which case you would have to provide 5v to the card reader from an alternative source such as a molex connector or floppy connector direct from the PC power supply to the card reader.
First off though I’d contact the PCI card manufacturer and find out what they say the reason is. I believe it’s a NEWlink product, their web address is http://www.newlinkproducts.co.uk. You need to find out whether it should work and if not why?
Posted on November 19th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
Hiya, Sorry me again. I finally got it working, many thanks for your suggestions. Sorry to hijack this article with my problems but I thought I would share them with you for anyone with an older Dell out there.
Firstly this (and many other) card readers connect to the motherboard via a nine-pin USB header plug. My old Dell Dimension 8200 doesnt have one, so an alternative solution had to be found.
The card does require 2 x USB feeds, one for its one front facing USB and one for the card slots. As I didn’t have the internal motherboard connection I installed a 6 port USB PCI card with 2 internal USB ports and connected the leads as previously mentioned.
This is where the fun starts because internal USB ports arent powered. But the externals are and this card reader requires power. I really didn’t want to drill a hole in the casing and I could not route the cables through a blanking plate becuase all my PCI slots are in use.
So I purchased a 4 port powered USB hub (to be mounted in a 3.5 floppy bay). I backwards mounted it so the USB outputs faced inwards. I then connected this to the internal port on the USB PCI card and connected the card reader to this (via the leads above). Success !!
I now have replaced my 3.5″ floppy with a card reader, 4 new drives appear in Windows Explorer and i can insert my 32gb card from my camera.
In all, a no-frills nice little card reader but make sure you have a nine-pin motherboard connection before you wish to upgrade your floppy drive to a card reader drive !
Posted on December 5th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
Fantastic, I’m so glad that you got it working. I bet it feels great that you achieved it even against the odds. I thought the problem may have been due to unpowered ports and my solution was going to be to run a pair of wires from a floppy drive power connector (5V) off the power supply directly to the card reader. This would have been a cheaper and possibly neater solution but it would have required cutting wires, a bit of soldering and some loss of warranty.
Posted on December 5th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Yes very satisfying !, but I cannot help thinking there must be a market for a direct replacement that utilises the old floppy drive cable and power leads ?
Again, many thanks for your help and suggestions.
Posted on December 5th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
I think the floppy controller is too limited to run a card reader. It certainly wouldn’t support 4 drives on a single connection and anyway the majority of PC motherboards have onboard USB headers. It’s just companies like Dell and HP that strip their PCs of anything that’s not needed to keep down prices.
Posted on December 5th, 2009 at 7:59 pm
I got this today, plugged it into my computer and the green light lit up.
4 removeable media drives appeared in my computer, but when I clicked any of them, it just said “insert disk” even though I had a 4GB SDHC (sandisk ultra II) in. The red light lit up when I put a memory card in.
I searched for drivers online and found some at the akasa website, installed them and the drives in my computer disappeared, and now both lights are on all the time, whether a memory card is in or not.
I still have no way to access the data on the memory cards. I uninstalled the drivers, but the removeable media drives in my computer did not come back. I reinstalled the drivers and nothing.
In device manager there is “unknown device.” Before I installed the drivers the first time there was seperate drives with names like “SD USB device” “Compact flash device.”
After installing drivers they all disappeared and “realtek card reader” appeared. After uninstalling drivers it is just “unknown device.” After reinstalling drivers it’s still “unknown device.”
I thought this was meant to be plug and play…
(Using Vista 64bit, the drivers were indeed 64 bit so shouldn’t have been a problem)
Posted on December 11th, 2009 at 6:30 pm
I think you had it right the first time. It should plug and play and come up with 4 drives. Have you confirmed that the SD card that you used was OK by another mean and do you have another card to try?
As for uninstalling the drivers and resorting back what you had, you should be able to go back to a restore point in vista using the windows restore feature. Preferably choose a point prior to the original install of the reader.
If all else fails then you could always just plug the reader into an alternative USB header on your motherboard (if you have another to spare) – this will make windows think it’s another new piece of hardware and it will re-install the drivers again. I would use restore first though.
Posted on December 11th, 2009 at 8:22 pm
A pop up appeared on the task bar, and said a USB device is not recognised.
It said to unplug the device and plug it in again, so I did (with the computer still on) and now it works
This is with the drivers installed.
FYI in my computer, a drive (eg the SD drive) only appears when there’s a card plugged into the slot, so it’s a bit neater with the drivers.
Posted on December 12th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
Looks like the driver you installed hides un-used slots which is useful as normally it can be awkward trying to determine which drive in ‘my computer’ refers to which slot on the reader!
Posted on December 12th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
you can get card readers very similar to this on ebay exept they have a micro sd slot on them for a couple of quid.
Posted on January 1st, 2010 at 11:07 pm
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