That's not a card reader, it's a flash to USB pen drive converter. The idea is that you load an appropriate memory card into the slot then plug it in. When it comes to ejecting it, you have to treat the whole thing the same as you would a usb pen drive, that is, you use the 'safely eject hardware' applet in the systray before unplugging it from the USB slot.
In any computer with proper USB you can short it out for as long as you like and nothing will break. The USB chips include such protection and even power management so the OS can limit the power being drawn.
If you are silly enough to wire a USB header to the 5V power rail there will be a big bang and things will melt when shorted. (seen that done)
There are good reasons why some electronics are like that.. its more reliable and is used in telecoms and military applications. Its only a problem if its done incorrectly.
I'm not going get ripped off by poundland I'm waiting till the 99p shop gets them in :)
Now you tell me! ;-)
I've bought multi-card readers from various suppliers and paid considerably more than £1 for them - without exception, any camera has refused to recognise a card formatted by one of these card readers.
You'll probably find an increasing number of MOBOs have a polyfuse from the outset.
AFAIK - available current negotiation is falling by the wayside - nowadays many just give you 500mA by default and use a polyfuse for protection.
The discussion and low price bring to mind something I discovered years ago in kit supplied by someone.
The kit required various 12V / 9V / 5V supplies for different items in the box. The 'designer' supplied some of the 9V or 5V by adding series resistors to the output from a 12V regulator.
The result was predictable. The voltages varied as the items drew currents that weren't constant. Performance was awful. And in the end some of the - very costly - items failed due to drawing a 'lower than assumed' current, so experiencing high rail voltages.
Caveat emptor. 8-/
Jim
Although you probably could eject the media from systray and then remove the card it would be more fiddly to do so.
That is more than likely due to Windows perverse default formatting strategy being inconsistent with what the camera expects to see. Most cameras require that a certain directory structure is present on their formatted media and some are very fussy about the file system.
I had a nasty fault with my Pentax istD when new sD memory cards crossed the 2GB to 4GB barrier. The camera formatted it OK recognised there was space on the card and allowed continued shooting after the 2GB barrier but failed to store any of them. A firmware update fixed it.
That's because, while they are formatted in camera using FAT32 or ExFAT, the cameras also want to see certain directories that they put on the card while formatting it for use. Every camera type has a different name for these directories, and a card formatted in a Fuji will not be recognised as formatted by a Sony, and vice versa, although after a card is formatted by both cameras, it will work equally well in both cameras, as it has both sets of proprietary directories, and all the camera does when formatting is check the FAT and add its oewn directories. The exception is, IIRC, Canon, who use a non-standard SD format instead of FAT, which makes their cards unreadable except by their software, even out of the camera.
My JVC HD video camcorder puts about five directories on the card, and it uses them for storing things like scratch files and metadata.
Like you, I was non the wiser as to it being a flash memory to USB pen drive converter when I bought it and assumed it was a card reader where you can leave it plugged into the USB port and eject and insert the media as per a card reader.
It took me a few tries before I was convinced it was simply a pen drive where you could pre-load the flash memory card of your choice.
I think it was the parkable USB plug on a very short cable that had confused me. The earlier version which just looked like an oversized pen drive with an SD slot left no such room for confusion.
That's news to me. I've got a couple of Canon stills cameras (PowerShot A720IS and SX40HS) and both use FAT32 on the SD media.
The only problem I had was the 2GB media limitation on the card reader in the PC which I sorted by upgrading to a newer card reader that was compatable with 4GB and larger capacity cards.
The Acer laptop had a single SD slot built in which, unfortunately, also had this 2GB limitation. Despite it seemingly not being a USB device, the firmware update did nothing for this limitation so when me and the missus went on a cruise a few years back when the A720 was a newly purchased camera, I took a couple of Poundland USB pen drive SD adapters which did support 4GB and larger cards.
That was also the only time I installed the camera crapware as a hedge against both pen drive adapters failing during the trip so I still had a means to siphon the photos off the 4GB SD cards via the camera's USB port. Thankfully, the need to run the crapware never arose.
BTW, there's really no point in bothering to format the media using a PC before putting it back in the camera. The camera is quite capable of doing its own format (full or quick) thus guaranteeing the required directory structure anyway. Formatting the media in a PC won't do any harm, it's just that you might as well let the camera 'initialise' the card for you to remove all doubts about necessary directory structures.
With the exception of PC Chips MoBos (and rebadged clones), thats been the case, ime, with every other brand of MoBo from before USB was thrust unwanted upon the industry by Intel's "Sneaky Tricks" dept (a strategy to ginger up the demand for more powerful CPUs).
The polyfuse was initially fitted to protect against shorts on the 5v pin in the PS/2 keyboard and mouse sockets (probably just a half or one amp polyfuse).
When USB started to appear on MoBos, they simply powered the 5v pins on the usb sockets and headers from the same fused supply rail on the MoBo, uprating the polyfuse to a 3 or 4 amp one to cater for the increased loading.
As far as I can see, Desktop PC MoBos never bothered with negotiated power protocols on the USB sockets. They simply fed the 5v from a 3 or
4 amp polyfuse or two, allowing unlimited current within the limit of the polyfuse rating to be available to a usb device. Dishing out an extra 15 to 20 watts to usb gadgets was never going to be an issue on a PC with a 300 watt or higher rated mains PSU to take the strain.I think the USB power protocol was only ever employed by laptop / netbook MoBos on account of the more limited power budget available for such luxuries along with being part of the power management features typical of laptop / netbook usage.
Obviously I misrembered the make, then. It was a camera being used by one of the teachers I was carrying on a tour round Europe, and the camera crashed when they tried to overfill the card with video. That's when I found that I couldn't even open the card on the computer using a couple of different file recovery programs, and checking on the maker's website mentioned that they use their own special formatting system.
I couldn't even download a copy of the required programme without giving them the full guarantee registration details of the camera, so I regtretfully handed the lot back to the client, recommending they buy a new card, but keep the old one for an attempted download when they either got home or to a dealer.
If I'm worried about confidentiality of the material on the card, I do a full secure wipe and format on the PC, as most of the cameras I've used only do a quick format on the card, and it's *amazing* how many pictures you can recover afterwards. One friend was extremely happy that I'd recovered some of his wedding pictures that he thought he'd lost after reformatting the card many times since the failed upload attempt, assuming all those pictures were lost for ever.
An interesting discovery about my Win7 Toshiba laptop came when I bought a Canon LED Scanner, which is powered from the USB socket.
The instructions say that it is a USB2 scanner. The laptop has 2xUSB2 and 1xUSB3 sockets. The scanner wouldn't run when connected to a USB2 socket but works perfectly powered from the USB3 socket. Whether the laptop is running from internal battery or from mains power made no difference. There must be something different about the power availability from the USB socket.
Jim
My Panasonic camera doesn't just format, it puts two folders on the card. One is where the photos go when I take them. The other contains a file of binary data - I have no idea what it does. It is a pretty safe bet that the camera firmware expects to find this folder structure on any media used. Windows formatting wouldn't set it up like that.
Jim
You can format the card hundreds of times, it won't erase the data unless it wears one of the cells out and reallocates a "free" one.
A full format, in theory, should generate an empty FAT and zero all the available cells. A quick format just generates an empty FAT.
Most cameras don't give you a choice, and often just check the card is formatted, format it if necessary, and then add their directories, leaving the rest of the file structure intact.
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