Performance

Addonics is venturing into an interesting new area for card readers with the eSATA equipped Pocket DigiDrive. It gives you the advantages of a card reader with the speed of the SATA connectivity. Thus, we took the fastest memory card at our disposal - the A-DATA 633x Compact Flash card and pitted it against the Lexar Firewire 800 CF reader, a normal USB 2.0 card reader and a Compact Flash to SATA adapter. The USB card reader offers the same easy access for different flash media formats, while the CF to SATA adapter goes for performance, but lacks the easy access to the media.

Before diving into the numbers, let's take a closer look how the M1 and M2 modes work. If you select M1 on a hot-swap SATA port, the drive letter refreshes every time a different memory card is inserted. If you happen to connect it to a SATA port without the hot-swap attribute, you will be required to either restart or update the status in the Device Manager. This is done by deleting the card reader, followed by searching for new Plug & Play devices. M2 mode dumbs things down a little, but also sacrifices the flexibility of a card reader. Addonics mentions in capital letters that this mode is NOT RECOMMENDED for hot-swap SATA ports. Thus we do not use it in such a fashion. If the connection lacks the latter attribute, you will be forced to have the media inserted before booting as it then shows up as a fixed SATA drive - just like a hard drive. Removing the Compact Flash card did not trigger the removal of the fixed disk in the Windows Explorer, but you could no longer read or write anything off or onto it.

It should be mentioned that the Pocket DigiDrive eSATA offers an additional scenario quite unique. While Compact Flash cards are easily used as fixed disks due to its IDE and thus SATA compatible interface, other formats are not. This card reader gives you the option to run any of the supported media as such a disk, allowing you to push the card to the limit, which in turn may have been out of reach for a USB 2.0 interface.

eSATA

The bench of HDTach results in 58.7 MB/s read performance. So, while it does utilize the eSATA interface nicely, the A-DATA card is faster on the CF to SATA adapter. The Addonics Pocket DigiDrive eSATA is still a very fast card reader and it beats the Lexar Firewire 800 CF reader by a long shot.


ATTO gives us very similar read speeds, while the write trend of the write speed follows the same direction with slightly lower performance on the Addonics Pocket DigiDrive eSATA than the internal CF to SATA adapter. Once again, the card reader is still an excellent performer for those who want the flexibilty of such a device, without sacrificing speed.

USB 2.0

We also took a quick look at the USB 2.0 interface of the Addonics Pocket eSATA DigiDrive. It manages to climb to just over 30 MB/s with the 633x Compact Flash card, which is something you can expect to see with most brand name card readers out there these days. Thus the USB 2.0 connectivity is a solid fall-back option if you happen to be in an environment where using eSATA is not a possibilty.


ATTO once again confirms the read performance over USB 2.0 and also reveals a 27 MB/s write performance. These numbers are pretty much half of what the Pocket DigiDrive is capable of when using eSATA.