Not all SD card readers are alike!

If you asked me a year ago what SD card reader to get, I probably would’ve said to just get whichever one works. Well, clearly, I was wrong!

I’m obviously not a hardcore photographer/videographer or professional multimedia editor or anything like that!

I tried out a handful of readers that I’ve had over the years. Here are the readers ranked from slowest to fastest. Probably from oldest to newest also.

This one I’ve had probably for over 10 years. These were like $2 or something back then. I think I either got it on eBay or some discount website. They were for convenience for me – back then, sometimes, I used these as USB sticks.

Bus 001 Device 002: ID 058f:6335 Alcor Micro Corp. SD/MMC Card Reader

This one came with one of my cameras or something. It was probably a cheap camera that recorded to microSD. It’s not terribly slow, but not reliable. Maybe it was the Linux driver, but there were many times when I couldn’t write the entire microSD card before it just hung. Pulling it out and remounting corrected this, but was done almost every other time when writing an entire sd card.

Bus 001 Device 025: ID aaaa:8816 MXT microSD CardReader

This one came with my Raspberry Pi. It’s also not terribly slow, but not fantastic. What I like about it is that it supports both, USB-A and USB-C.

Bus 001 Device 024: ID 14cd:1212 Super Top microSD card reader (SY-T18)

Here’s the speed of an internal microSD card on a 2021 Dell Inspiron 5502/5509. Pretty disappointing speed!

Also crap, this was something like $30 – pretty expensive, but elegantly fits on the MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, not very reliable. When plugging in too many things, you could get very annoying, random disconnects.