With the increasing popularity of the SD form factor for media storage (SDHC, SDXC, etc) in modern devices like Cameras, Camcorders and more it was no surprise to see many mobile devices built with an SD card reader. However, most desktop were left out as there is no spot on a motherboard to deal with this. So many photographers and videographers end up tethering their cameras to their systems just to get their images onto them for work. This is awkward and can be annoying. True there is an option for a multi-card reader, but many of those are slow or can be as bulky as the cameras were. With the release of the USB 3.0 specification and the rise of the case with USB 3.0 ports on the front it was time to revisit the multi-card reader. Today we have a small USB 3.0 multi-card reader from Kingston that is not much bigger than a USB flash drive. So follow along as we introduce you to the Kingston MobileLite G3 USB 3.0 Reader.
Performance -
Testing the performance of a drive of any type is a pain. Sure you can get repeatable numbers using a few of the more readily available testing utilities; Sisoft’s SANDRA, HD Tune, PCMark7’s Storage Suite, AIDA64, and others. The performance on the MobileLite G3 when plugged into an NEC USB 3.0 controller was solid. We were more than happy with the results that we got considering we were looking at an SDHC card (which does not have the same speed as native flash memory like a USB flash drive).
Sisoft SANDRA -
The storage tests in SANDRA cover the range of IOPs (Input/Output operations per second) to actual data transfer rates based on an aggregate or average rating. We use this for a baseline for the rest of our testing.
As you can see from the table above the MobileLite G3 when paired with the Kingston Ultimate XX 233X 16GB SDHC card does very well. Although (as we said) it is no match for traditional flash media it makes a very strong showing here.
AIDA64 -
AIDA64 does a great job of showing the different levels of performance for different read functions. This allows us to establish a clearer baseline for the rest of our performance comparison.
As you can see here the performance was pretty good across the board with a solid 60MB/s in all but the buffered read testing. This is very good performance considering you are working with a reader instead of native flash memory.
PCMark7 Storage Tests -
The PCMark 7 suite of storage tests is fairly intensive and includes scanning for malware, moving images, a video editing script and more items that require good HDD read and write speeds each one of these has its own transfer rate that will be recorded and combine to make up the overall score.
Our Storage testing with PCMark07 shows that there are some items that are just going to hammer at the controller in the MobileLite (and also at any SD card you put in). You can see that write functions are seriously impacted (picture and music transfers) while read functions do significantly better.
HD Tune Pro 4.6 -
HD Tune Pro is another application that can give you the run down on your HDDs it performs both read and write tests although its write test is destructive and cannot be run on a drive that contains any partition information. For our testing here we ran both the read and write tests and recorded the average transfer rates.
HD Tune also backs up the other read speeds that we are seeing which gives us a range of 50-55MB/s on the Kingston MobileLite G3 when using the Kingston Ultimate XX 233X SDHC card. Performance may vary with other media types, but we do know that running this same card through the SD card slot on our Asus EEE Slate does not get us near the 50MB/s mark. We typically hit about 42-45MB/s max with that reader.
In general usage we found the MobileLite G3 to work very well for both video and image transfers. It exceeds the performance of any of the built in card readers we have and is much more flexible for desktop use.
