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Serbia, Belgrade
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689 Review
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Review on High-Speed Transcend TS-RDF5K USB 3.1 Card Reader for SDHC/SDXC/microSDHC/SDXC Cards - Black by Tarus Clinton

Revainrating 4 out of 5

It is not possible to test cards with speeds higher than 95MB/s, which prevents real speed tests.

I bought this card reader because I currently only have USB 2.0 which means the bottleneck when testing high performance cards is the card reader. I bought this USB 3.1 Gen 1 card reader (USB 3.2 Gen 1 as it's now called) hoping it would solve this problem. The USB ports on all my computers are 5Gbps (the whole USB-IF naming structure is confusing and confusing. My ports are NOW called USB 3.2 Gen 1 but used to be more commonly called USB 3.0 or USB 3.1 Gen 1). ). I don't have UHS-II cards either, so I didn't expect that getting a true speed reference for the more expensive UHS-1 SDHC and SDXC cards would be a problem. I was wrong, high performance UHS-1 cards (yes, UHS Class 3, but still UHS-1) will make the most of this card reader, the card reader limits the test's true speed rating, gives you an inconclusive test and may force you to think that the card is fake or falsely advertised (both are too common with MicroSD cards, so we don't need a card reader to falsely promote these claims as the top speed is below 100MB/s and your card advertised as 160MB/s (most people will assume it is a card and not a card reader since USB 3.0 is advertised as 5Gb/s) Unfortunately this card reader cannot support high end cards, including my SanDisk Extreme cards (A2/V30/C10/UHS-1/U3), The card reader works at a maximum speed of 95 Mb/s At first I thought maybe my SanDisk card was simple overloaded and didn't reach the advertised speed, but looking at the other reviews here it seems pretty clear that the top speed of this card reader is 95MB/s. None of those who posted test photos reported speeds over 95Mbps, so if you have high speed cards and REALLY want to see HOW FAST it unlocks its maximum potential, I would suggest looking elsewhere, this card reader is not for you. After the inconclusive results from this card reader, I purchased a Kingston MobileLite+ USB 3.2 UHS-II card reader. While I wasn't sure if it would work any better, and because some branded readers don't work well with other branded cards, I gave it a try and can say that it actually did meet the advertised speed of 160Mbps for my Sandisk Extreme (A2 /V30) has generated. card /C10/UHS-1/U3). So as I suspected and now confirmed, if you are testing cards that claim to hit over 95Mbps in tests, this card reader will NOT give you accurate results. I also verified this with a Lexar Pro 667x, which also failed 95Mbps on a Transcend card reader and actually beat the advertised 100Mbps at 102Mbps with a Kingston UHS-II cardreader. If you're looking for a true benchmark of speed for your high-performance UHS-I card, I recommend the UHS-II card reader. for you, then this card reader can be useful for you. I can't give this card reader a "bad" rating as it does a good job of reading cards at "normal" or "standard" speeds. It also doesn't claim to be able to read any high speeds it doesn't hit, so it's not falsely advertised, it just leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to testing really fast cards. However, it is VERY easy to use and VERY inexpensive. It gets warm, but that's to be expected with smaller card readers that are "somewhat" fast.

Pros
  • Wide Range
Cons
  • Zero