With the upgrade to the D300, I suddenly noticed that the download of the CF cards using my old card reader were, well, painfully slow. Looking at it I realized I had bought the “first best” card reader back in 2004 I had found in a larger department store, and that it was about time to optimize this part of my workflow tool chain… And this time (and probably only this time…) it came much cheaper than I had feared 
After a quick Internet research in October 08, I found the fabulous flash memory toolkit software allowing for a quick and easy benchmark of the current situation. So I hooked on my flash card reader, put in the fastest of my cards – a 133x Transcend 4 GByte – and ran the file based benchmark.
Shock.
3.8 MByte/s read speed (25x)? That explained the less than 1 RAW/s feeling, but how could this be? The device – and I remember I had explicitely looked for that – sported a large and friendly “USB 2.0 high-speed-storage” printed on the top. Well, it’s still faster than the 1.5 MBytes/s that USB 1.0 would have allowed, but way below the theoretical 60 MBytes/s USB 2.0 could offer. Note that I did not use an external USB hub, but connected the card reader directly to the computer’s port.
Ok, decision to buy was easy to make at this point, and a more in-depth search of the Internet brought me to the device of choice: A Digisol card reader 47201 I purchased at Amazon.de for – believe it! – 2.89€.
Add 2.90€ for shipping, and I got the cute little white guy for 5.79€. What kind of gear do you get nowadays for this kind of money? Now, of course I was interested if the device would do any better than my old one (or if it could read cards at all), and now look at this:
Problem solved: About 27 MBytes/s for the important “download to computer” category. And man, you can feel the difference 
BTW – anybody understands the speed ratings of the CF cards? AFAIK they are based on CD-ROM drive speed ratings, which traditionally have been specified compared to the speed of a “single speed” music CD. This has been used for data CDs as 150 KBytes/s, although the Music speed really is 44000 Hz with 16 bit times two (stereo) and therefore approx 172 KBytes/s, but who cares. Using the 150 KBytes/s for the Transcend 133x, it should have 19,5 MBytes/s, and not 27 MBytes/s read nor 10 MBytes/s write (and write is more important for the photographer, I’d say). The Transcend website specifies it with 21.5 MBytes/s max!?
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