I finally found a reason to need USB 2.0. I was trying to transfer a movie (made with Pocket DVD Studio–watch out for the automatic Star Wars movie on their website!) to my SD card so I could watch it on my Palm. I put the card in the USB card reader, dragged and dropped, and again and again I got “device error” or “device not ready” after about three minutes of copying. These were big files, about 200 MB, and I had never had problems using this card reader for smaller files.

I began to be suspicious. Tried transferring the same file to the card using the built-in card reader on my laptop (which is USB 2), and it worked perfectly the first time. It seemed the transfer was just going too slow over my poor sluggish little USB 1.0 connection on the desktop computer, so it was timing out, or something.

Quick check to newegg, and a combo USB 2.0/Firewire PCI card is only about $20 (I couldn’t get a USB only card–had to replace my firewire card, because I didn’t have a PCI slot to spare!). Popped that one in, and voila! Not only will my movies go successfully over to my SD card–they’ll go in only about 2 minutes, instead of six minutes.

Now I just need to sell off my old Belkin Firewire card, and rent and rip me some DVD’s for my next plane ride!