Lexar Professional USB 3.0 Card Reader

Memory cards are getting astonishingly fast. The fastest CompactFlash now chugs along at around 101Mbyte/sec and the latest SD cards do a barely-slower 95Mbyte/sec. So I was pleased to see the first USB 3.0 card reader, from Lexar, land on my desk for review this issue.

The basic design hasn’t changed from earlier versions of the Lexar Professional. Pop the card reader out of the base to slot a CF or SD card in and once done, you can push the card reader portion back into the base, safe and sound in the knowledge that you won’t get fluff or grit on the delicate pins. For someone like me, who always seems to have a bag full of grit and cruft, this is a definite bonus.

The real question, of course, is how well does it perform? I tested the card reader on a USB 3.0-enabled laptop, using a 600X Lexar Professional CF card, and achieved read speeds of 48MByte/sec – all important for copying photos off a card. Writes were also speedy, at 35MByte/sec. I’d hoped for closer to the expected 92MB/s maximum from such a high end card combined with a USB 3.0 port, particularly since a slower 60MB/sec rated CF card gave us equivalent speeds. This may be an issue with the USB 3.0 port – a desktop port may be faster, for example – but many people would face a similar issue, if so.

For SD cards, using a 133X SDXC card produced read speeds of 25Mbyte/sec, with write speeds of 13Mbyte/sec. These are faster than you’d see on USB 2.0.

Is it worth an upgrade from an existing reader? If you use fast CF and SD cards and have a USB 3.0 enabled system then at this price, yes.