[moleculeism]

Hello,

I'm looking to buy a low cost PC which will be used mainly as a testing device for high speed memory cards such as SD and Compact Flash. It should have built in USB 3.0 port that I can plug an external reader into, or I could theoretically add a USB 3 or even a dedicated multicard reader via pci etc...
A laptop can work also but I'm trying to keep costs down to a minimum for this device.

My goal is to eliminate any and all bottle neck limitations for testing the top speed of the cards.

 

Please let me know if any of you have a solution that might work.

Some of the big online retailers have specials from Lenovo and HP that range from $200-300, I'm just not sure how to tell if the USB 3.0 ports that are built in, may be slower than if I build my own PC with an i3 or i5 processor.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks in advance,

Glenn

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i would think the USB3.0 PCI card would be the cheapest solution to this problem

[dsenette]

i would think the USB3.0 PCI card would be the cheapest solution to this problem

[iammykyl]

I was thinking along the same line.   Consider this type of reader. > http://www.ebay.com....sd=110962944085

[terry1966]

the cpu is not where the bottleneck lays, the bottleneck is the actual data bandwidth available with the connection type used on the motherboard and because usb 3 is a standard then all pc's with a usb3 port will have the same speeds whether you build it yourself or buy it from a shop.

 

a pci-e card is the way i'd go too.

 

saying that tho even a usb3 pci-e card will not be able to transfer data at usb3 speeds if it only uses 1 lane and is connected to a motherboard using a pci-e 1.0 standard (not likely).

 

this is for graphics but does explain the bandwidth capabilities of pci-e :- http://www.tested.co...nd-thunderbolt/

 

so there is more to know about data transfer speeds and the bottlenecks you might run into, even the usb3 connection itself will now bottleneck the fastest ssd drives, sd and flash memory sticks are not at that point yet, but there will come a time that they also will saturate the usb3 capability so that is something else to be aware of.

 

[iammykyl]

If you are going to use your present computer?    Please let us know, 

The MB brand/model,

Installed RAM, brand/model.

We can then tell you if using a PCI-E box, as listed, will work OK.