Cheap Zio Corporation DM8500 Zio! Compactflash Reader USB (Electronics) Price

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Customer Reviews of Zio Corporation DM8500 Zio! Compactflash Reader USB

Great item
After using this flash ROM "drive" for a week I went out and bought another since they're so cheap, and a 128M ROM to go with it to supplement the 64M ROM I already have.

They both installed without any problems. After installing the drivers off the CD and rebooting, the drives were recognized immediately as soon as I plugged them into the USB ports on my keyboard. Pretty cool.

I use these as "fat floppies" since the files I manipulate and update everyday no longer fit on a single floppy. With the two new ZiO! drives, I can make two copies, one to each flash ROM and I'm pretty well covered. The probability that both ROMs will fail simultaneously are pretty slim. But just to make sure I back up once a week to CD-R.

The only reason I don't use the CR-R option more often is that I have Windows XP and the Adaptec CD Creator software still doesn't seem to work very well except under Windows 98. That means I have to dual-boot back into 98 to burn a CD, which is a little inconvenient and time-consuming. The purchase of these two ZiO! drives completely obviates that problem for everyday needs.

The only thing to watch out for is you might want to get a ROM with a higher write speed if you intend to update many megs worth of files every day. I don't know what the speed is, but the 64M ROM is the faster of the two, and it copies things over about twice as fast as the larger 128M ROM. I got the slower rating for the big one since it was cheaper, and both are more than large enough to accommodate anything I want to back up. But the speed difference is noticeable between the two if you're transferring lots of megs all the time.

This is mainly observable when copying many smaller files. For smaller numbers of large files, the copy rate is considerably, perhaps 2 or 3 times, faster, which is interesting.

Overall, a great little product and not that expensive either given the extra speed and convenience.

Easy to Use
I LOVE this item.
I plugged it into the USB port on my laptop (WIN 2000) and I was able to see the CF card just like a disk drive. No problems, no hassles.

I bought this one after I returned a CF reader from another manufacturer (it was on sale). After an hour of trying to get the other reader to work, I gave up. This one worked right away.