Right after connecting the E3 Card Reader to a spare USB port, 3 drives will show up in Explorer. The first drive may or may not appear with a label; in case it appears with a label, it will be E3_4M_STICK and it has a total of 4MB free space. This drive may be used for uploading small text documents or other software (like homebrew for the PS3).

The second drive is labeled E3Upgrader, does have only 128KB and it is meant only for flashing the reader with a new firmware from the E3 China website; they are constantly updating the website and offer the E3 Card owners the latest available firmwares; the latest firmware is a dual-boot one, which means that it can load two different payloads (Hermes when there is no microSD card into the reader and Kakaroto with a card loaded into it). This is a good thing because we do not have to flash the device every time when we want to switch from one payload to another.

The third drive is available only when a microSD card is loaded into the device:

Upgrading the device firmware is extremely easy and does not need extra software; we only have to drag and drop the file we have picked up from the E3 website to the E3Upgrader drive:

After the firmware flash is completed, we can see the blue LED light up in the back of the device:

When testing the internal 4MB flash with HD Tune Pro, we can see that it gets speeds near USB 1.0:

The copy and read speeds of the microSD card, when inserted into the E3 Card Reader are much lower compared to when using an aftermarket adapter (SDHC to microSDHC):

Copy (adapter)

Read(adapter)

Copy(E3 reader)

Read(E3 reader)