(Alcor Micro Corp) HP Pavilion Desktop 15-in-1 Card Reader
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2856
06-10-2009
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9.0
Description:
This is the 15-in-1 flash card reader (and writer I think..) located in the uppermost half-bay on the front of a HP Pavilion a6345f Desktop computer.
This particular one is black, with 4 slots for all of SmartMedia/xD, SD/Mini/MMC/RS/Plus/Mobile, CompactFlash I/II/MD, and MS/PRO/Duo/PRO Duo. There is a green LED that lights when a card is inserted.
The controller inside it is from Alcor Micro Corp. The card slots appear to the kernel as removable SCSI disks. The unit connects to a USB header on the motherboard.
sh-3.1# lsusb:
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 058f:6377 Alcor Micro Corp.
sh-3.1# lsscsi
[0:0:0:0] cd/dvd PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-212D 1.24 /dev/sr0
[4:0:0:0] disk Generic USB SD Reader 1.00 /dev/sda
[4:0:0:1] disk Generic USB CF Reader 1.01 /dev/sdb
[4:0:0:2] disk Generic USB SM Reader 1.02 /dev/sdc
[4:0:0:3] disk Generic USB MS Reader 1.03 /dev/sdd
Note that this is probably not normally a purchase-able device (unless maybe you have a Pavilion and need a replacement under warranty or something like that) as it comes packaged/shaped/sized with custom bracket and face-plate to fit only on Pavilion and maybe other HP boxes.
But, if you have a Pavilion and are wondering if the 15-in-1 card reader will work with Linux, it seems the answer is 'yes'.
I got this device out of a near-new Pavilion box I found on the roadside :) minus its motherboard, and made a new front bezel out of a case blank to fit my case, and mounted it into a shortened metal housing of a gutted CDROM drive. It fits in an unused bay and works great, at least with the only CF card I own, which is a 128MB Lexar SD card from a HP Photosmart 320 camera.
During boot, the thing appears as 4 SCSI removable disks sda, sdb, sdc, sdd, and when I insert a card into the SD slot, the green light lights and a /dev/sd1 appears, which can be mounted using a normal fstab entry with 'auto' as the filesystem.
The kernel USB Mass Storage driver seems to be all that's needed to access it.
I give it a 9/10 only because it's packaged to fit only a select few boxes (HP ones, not generic cases) but a person could make an external housing for it or mount it as I did. For the price, I am not complaining.
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