The IT Nerd

I am in the midst of finalizing my new desk setup having made some major changes. I’ll be sharing the final result with you in the coming weeks. But right now, I’m here to talk about one of those changes. Which is the UGREEN 4-in-1 USB 3.0 SD Card Reader/

So the reason why I need this is that I am redoing my desk setup to support having my MacBook Pro in clamshell mode. As in the lid is closed and connected to an external monitor. So I wanted to either replicate on enhance the ability to read SD cards and the like. I went the enhance route and got this at Memory Express for $22.99 CDN. One the front, there’s a Compact Flash card slot at the top and a Sony Memory Stick Card slot on the bottom. I don’t have any of those and I don’t know who else would have any of those. But if you have one of those, it’s there.

On the right side there’s a SD Card slot at the top and a Micro SD card slot at the bottom. Short of doing CF Express cards which I don’t have any, I’m covered for most situations. One thing that I should point out is that this card reader is a fingerprint magnet. Though it’s not visible in the picture, there’s also a blue light that seems to only indicate that it is plugged into a USB-A port and getting power. The light isn’t all that bright so you can leave it connected without lighting up a dark room.

In terms of performance, I plugged it into a USB 3.1 Gen 1 port that does 5 Gbps, and used a SD card that was rated for 95 MB/s read speeds and got this result:

91.14 MB/s validates that this card reader is performing very close to expectations and the card reader along with the USB bus isn’t really holding it back all that much if at all.

One cool feature is that each card slot appears to act independently. For example, if I pop in a Micro SD card and an SD card, both will appear on the desktop of my Mac and I can copy items between them. I don’t know when I would need such functionality, but it’s handy to know that I could do that if I needed to.

Honestly, I have no complaints or drawbacks about this card reader. It does the job by supporting a number of card type, it’s fast, and doesn’t break the bank. I highly recommend it.

This entry was posted on November 12, 2024 at 8:59 am and is filed under Products with tags Ugreen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.