Transcend USB 2.0 High Speed Card Bus Adapter

Transcend's website

The Universal Serial Bus, where would we be today if it wasn’t around? Most likely, we’d all be using Apple’s “FireWire” standard, or the good old 9 pin COM port. Thankfully, now almost every desktop computer has plenty of USB ports. Many laptops out there have USB support, however usually you only get one port, if you’re lucky two - and they only support the older USB 1.1 standard.

So what are laptop users supposed to do if they’ve got four USB devices they want to hook-up and only one port? Go buy a USB Hub right? The problem with USB hubs is usually you have to have an external power supply, and if you’re a desktop user that’s ok, but if you’re on the go, the fewer things you have to plug in the better. Moreover, what if your laptop is USB 1.1 and you need to use your USB 2.0 hard drive, or scanner?

Well as usual, Transcend has just the answer to all your computer problems. This time it’s the USB 2.0 High speed Card Bus Adapter.

Features:

• Auto detect speeds and connections of devices
• High Speed Data Transfer Rate up to 480Mbps
• Integrated physical layer transceivers
• Normal and low power operating modes
• Full Plug and Play compatible
• Open Host Controller Interface compatible
• USB 2.0/1.0 compatible

The Transcend card is a Hi-Speed USB 2.0 2-port Card Bus adapter that upgrades notebook computers to the new and faster USB standard. This card is designed to work with mice, keyboards, external CD-R/RW's, external hard drives, PC cameras, and any other USB device you could possibly think of. It is 40 times faster than previous USB adapters. The card is backward compatible with USB 1.0 and USB 1.1 products. What does that mean? It means you can connect all of your old USB 1.x to the USB 2.0 adapter and they will work. Each port detects whether the connected device is USB 1.x or USB 2.0 and automatically runs the device at the correct speed.

Installation:

Installing the card is easy in a Windows XP environment, simply plug the card in and you’re ready to go. Transcend has made it easy for those of you who still use older versions of windows – simply pop in the included CD-ROM and follow the guide. The only problem that we noticed when installing the card was the fact that it was a little large. This meant it tended to block other PCMCIA slots.

Performance:

We thought we’d put the card through a long, extensive data transfer – so we plugged in our external 60 GB hard drive enclosure and started backing up the hard drive. The card performed just as we had suspected – flawlessly, it handled the backup with out a problem, and it performed at USB 2.0 speeds just like promised.

Conclusion:

So whether you need to add more USB ports to your laptop or you want to upgrade to the new USB 2.0 high speed standard – at only $40~$50, the “Transcend 2 port USB 2.0 CardBus” is just the thing you need!

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