other than the external sony reader that goes for 249.00 are there any you can mount in your computer in the front in a drive bay?
as far as their main purpose of transferring the files, all the same?
breakdowns happening on these would be minimal i would think

I haven't seen any but you can pick up a used usb sony SxS card reader for about $150.00 on some of the forums. With the external reader you can take it with you into the field to use with a laptop as well as use it at home on your desktop computer.

I'd love to see a eSATA connected ExpressCard reader but haven't heard of anything like that - just the Sonnet Qio PCIe unit for Macs. USB is so slow!

We happen to have a netbook with an ExpressCard slot and a gigabit network adapter - this works pretty well for quickly offloading SxS cards to network storage - about triple the speed of the USB connected Sony reader.

Hi Steve, can you tell us what netbook and the copy speed in MB/s?

I'm using one of this with my desktop:

PCI Express to ExpressCard 34|54 Slot Drive Read-Writer Front, Synchrotech (http://www.synchrotech.com/products-expc/pcie-expresscard-slot-drive_03.html)

- and am very happy. Super fast transfer of SxS, adequate - of USB based SDHCs...

Any speed specs, Piotr?

Full SxS speed, not limited by the bus speed as the latter is 2.5Gbps (PCI Express).

In practice, it's well over 100 MBps when copying to a RAID 0 HDD (in the case of SDHC cards - below 30 MBps).

Oh, and one more thing - I'm also using the Synchrotech PCIe->ExpressCard drive to read my nanoFlash-recorded CF cards, through a simple ExpressCard CF adapter. Up to 90 MBps read speed!