Prograde

Digital USB 3.1 Gen 2 Dual-slot

£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 utilize 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 here, with its published read/write speeds slightly surpassed at 99Mbps and 88Mbps.