Review on J Tech Digital JTD UH302E Express Adapter by Robert Cole

So my laptop is getting a bit old. Elitebook hp 8730w. This is a 17 inch workstation with a Core 2 Duo Extreme processor, 4 GB of RAM and a Quadro 2700M 512 MB. It has an E-Sata port, but who else uses it unless you happen to have an external E-Sata drive lying around. I actually bought this card reader from Amazon in 2012. This was actually a replacement for another that didn't work on my other laptop (Asus G51VX) which I also bought here first with a Revain which I returned assuming it was defective and that one didn't work either. It could shut down randomly or give me random I/O errors. So I thought my express card slot in this laptop is defective. So this card reader came back in the box and has sat in my closet to this day. This Asus laptop died recently so I started using my old HP laptop for everything because it's pretty fast with my Western Digital Black2 dual drive (120GB SSD, 1TB HDD) and never gives me any problems has, apart from being a bit old and huge. I use a 1TB WD My Passport USB 3.0 5400rpm drive to back up Acronis files and let me tell you, waiting 30 hours to back up 800GB of important data via USB 2.0 was nothing what I really wanted to wait. .I don't have a power adapter plugged into my laptop's USB 2.0 port, instead I use a USB power adapter that plugs into my surge protector. I use a USB extension cable to get to the top of the table and then connect the included USB power cable to it. Sucker is 5V, 2.6 amp so it provides stable power supply to the card reader. I'm sure this probably helps make the transfer more stable and faster since I'm not using the laptop's own USB power supply to power the drive. I'm using the latest drivers from the J-Tech Digital website. This time I didn't even bother with the driver CD. I found the drivers online in about 2 minutes. I don't understand why people use this drive. Latest drivers likely offer speed improvements, my speed tests below prove this crap works. Also, the driver disk is almost 2 years old since I received it. The whole saying "don't fit if it ain't broke" doesn't really apply to today's technology in my opinion. I mean, come on, horses still exist, but you don't give up your car to ride them just because horses still exist and "work," right? The following tests were run with the same setup. Run the USB 2.0 tests first, then immediately run the 3.0 tests. I haven't restarted Windows, messed around with drivers, or even turned off a card reader. So, here are the tests: ------------------------------------------- --------- ---------------------------------CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 Shizuku Edition x64 (C ) 2007-2013 hiyohiyo Crystal Dew World: [.]--- ------------------------------ ----- --------------- ------------------* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/ 300 = 300,000 .000 bytes/ s] Sequential Read: 39.669 MB/s Sequential Write: 28.724 MB/s 512 KB Random Read: 23.507 MB/s 512 KB Random Write: 28.050 MB/s 4 KB Random Read (QD=1): 0.494 MB /s [120.6 IOPS] 4 KB Random Write (QD= 1): 0.830 MB/s [202.8 IOPS] 4 KB Random Read (QD=32): 0.502 MB/s [122.7 IOPS] 4 KB Random Write (QD=32): 0.820 MB/ss [200.3 IOPS] Test: 1000 MB [P: 0.0% (0.4/931.5 GB)] (x5) Date: 2014-05-02 00:26: 40 OS: Windows 7 Enterprise SP1 [6.1 Build 7601 ] (x64) And here are my speeds with this J-Tech card adapter (connected to my USB AC adapter with the included power cord) ----------- - ------ -- ---------------- ---------------------CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 Shizuku Edition x64 (C) 2007-2013 hiyohiyo Crystal Dew World : [.]-------- ---------------------------------- -------- -------- --- -----------------------* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 bytes/s] Sequential Read: 91.157 MB/s Sequential Write: 90.707 MB/s 512 KB Random Read: 35.672 MB/s 512 KB Random Write: 50.387 MB/s 4 KB Random Read (QD=1) : 0.513 MB/s [125.2 IOPS ] 4 KB Random Write (QD=1) : 0.918 MB/s [224.2 IOPS] 4 KB Random Read (QD=32) : 0.535 MB/s [130.6 IOPS] 4 KB Random Write (QD=32) : 0.812 MB/s [198.2 IOPS] Benchmark : 1000 MB [P: 0.0% (0.4/931.5 GB) )] (x5) Date: 2014-05-02 0:34:38 OS: Windows 7 Enterprise SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64) So with this reader I get 90 MB/s READ AND WRITE on a 5400 RPM hard drive on a 2009 laptop. My rating is 5 out of 5!