Hama USB 3.1 Type C UHS II OTG Card Reader

£20 http://uk.hama.com

Hama’s entry doesn’t look like much, measuring a tiny 34 x 40 x 10mm. It’s partly intended to add an SD port directly to a tablet or smartphone, hence the built-in USB Type-C plug – no cable required. It’s also just the ticket for complementing the newest generation of ultra-slim laptops that only sport Type-C ports.

Despite the compactness and reasonable price, this is still a UHS-II SD reader, and can max out the very quickest SD cards. We found it impressively fast, peaking at 260MBps when reading video and 195MBps reading images; just fractionally behind the record-setting ProGrade reader. Write speeds with video are slightly less remarkable: the 199MBps we achieved is nothing special, although the Hama bounces back with a winning 118MBps performance when writing images.

Performance with UHS-I SD cards is just as strong, with a 99MBps read rate outdoing even the ProGrade reader, while the 85MBps write speed is only 3MBps off the top spot.