Shoutbox

A USB PCI card will, from the outside anyway, look like motherboard-mounted ports. They shoudl also work 100% reliably, though maybe not quite as fast as they should (the PCI interface is slower than the max USB2 speed).

The 'Safely Remove Hardware' is mostly used for hard disk drives and the like, which use a small cache to enhance performance. If you disconnect the drive before the cache is written to disk, you risk losing data. Pen drives and memory card readers don't use caching AFAIK, so theoretically you can remove them without risking data.