I recently purchased the Belkin Hi-Speed USB 2.0 8-in-1 Media Reader (F5U248) so I could more easily access the different memory media formats that pass through my hands. For your pleasure, a quick and dirty review.

This is a great little product that works flawlessly under linux. It is seen as a usb-storage device (SCSI over USB) which makes this media reader pretty standard fair. There is, however, one catch. Your kernel must support multiple LUNs on a single SCSI device (kernel config param CONFIG_SCSI_MULTI_LUN=y).

My daily home system runs Fedora Core 1 (Yarrow) with all the latest patches. The current kernel for Core 1 as I write this is 2.4.22-1.2188.nptl. This kernel does not support multi-LUN SCSI devices, so I only had access to the first LUN, which is the CompactFlash slot. I had to recompile the kernel from the Fedora 2188 patched source (easier said than done) before I could access all the slots (LUNs).

Starting from the upper left slot going clockwise, the LUNs line up like this:

1st LUN - CompactFlash
2nd LUN - MemoryStick
3rd LUN - SmartMedia
4th LUN - Secure Digital/MultiMediaCard (SD/MMC).

In my system, which has no SCSI hard disks, the slots line up with the sd devices in the same clockwise fashion. CF = /dev/sda, MemStick = /dev/sdb, SmartMedia = /dev/sdc, and SD/MMC = /dev/sdd. All media I've put in so far has shown up as the first partition. My SD/MMCs mount from /dev/sdd1 and my Smart Media mounts from /dev/sdc1.

All in all the thing works great. The multi-LUN SCSI support threw me at first though. I hope now that I've written this your go at it will be easier.

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