ProGrade Digital USB 3.1 Gen 2 Dual-Slot Card Reader

£70/$80 www.progradedigital.com

ProGrade Digital is a relatively new brand, developed by ex-Lexar employees with a passion for quality kit. To that end, this is one of a very rare breed of card readers to be USB 3.1 Gen 2 compliant, which means it can transfer at theoretically double the speed of all the other readers here. In practice, even a UHS-II SD card won’t get anywhere near USB 3.1 Gen 2’s 1.25GB/s bandwidth limit, but this reader can still unleash every last drop of performance from any SD or CFast 2.0 card.

With maximum video read/write rates of 264MBps and 232MBps respectively, only the ProGrade could fully exploit the claimed 260MBps read and 240MBps write figures of our UHS-II SD card. Image transfer rates of 202MBps read and 103MBps write were closer to other readers in the group, but no less impressive.

Our UHS-I test card was equally well catered for, with its published read/write speeds slightly surpassed at 99MBps and 88MBps.