A Closer Look

Since the Baymaster is a very affordable little unit, you cannot expect to see a bunch of surprises. It is fairly light and a metal shell of size similar to a normal floppy drive holds the PCB of the card reader. There is an Akasa sticker on the top of the unit.


Interestingly enough, the Baymaster utilizes a SATA power connector instead of a normal Molex one. While this would make sense if the SATA bay were simply passed through to the mainboard SATA connector. Instead the data of the card reader and the drive bay is transfererd via USB. It would have been a nice touch to have the performance benefit of an SATA interface. Akasa has probably chosen to go with USB 2.0 so that even older system can use the device properly, which still does not explain the SATA power plug as most such computers which do not have these power connectors at their disposal.


The PCB is green and the top has been covered by a white sticker to protect it when a drive is pushed into the bay. Only the microSDHC slot is on this side of the PCB, while the rest - SDHC/MMC, a Memory Card and an Xtreme Digital slots - placed on the underside of the PCB.


There are also two larger ICs on this side. The one is an Realtek RTS5130 which is a simple USB 2.0 card reader IC and is used to give you the ability to use all these memory card formats in the device. The second IC used to have a label, which is no longer visible. but if look closely you can see that there is a JMicron logo on there in the top left corner.