N9 years ago I reached out to Lexar trying to get my hands on this super
cool modular card reader Tower dock thing called the workflow hr1 they
didn't reply to me so ultimately I bought not one but two of them which we
used for years they're super cool you can use the modules either inside the
tower which can be either USB or Thunderbolt or separately if you need to
take them on the go only one small problem Lexar totally abandoned this
product line is what I used to say not only did Lexar send me the brand new
workflow but they actually sponsored this video checking it out and this
thing looks absolutely sick now instead
of being Thunderbolt 2 or USB 3 it is
Thunderbolt 4 instead of having four docks it can support up to six docks
plus a couple of USB ports one type a
one type c in the front and it even supports daisy chaining up to six of
these devices according to the Thunderbolt spec including having
displays in line with it and whatever else it even supports USB power delivery
so if you have say for example your MacBook hooked up to it or something
like that you can charge your MacBook at up to 140 WS while you use it we'll get
to that in a second first I want to take a closer look at this bad boy there's
our 140 W charging there's our Thunderbolt port and there's our
Thunderbolt daisy chain there's a cooling fan there's a cooling fan intake
I guess we've kind of covered it oh no we haven't right not all of the bays at
the front are made equal two of them are 40 gbit per second so that's the maximum
speed supported by Thunderbolt 4 and then the other four are 10 gbit per
second and the savy among you are probably going to have figured out that
you're not going to be able to saturate all six of these bays at exactly the
same time the construction is aluminum feels quality especially when you
compare it to the plastic construction of the old one and oh I'm curious will
the old modules oh nope not even close
uh let's see what else comes in the Box okay professional workflow customize
your needs with versatile modular readers and and portable ssds we've got
support for dual slot SD UHS 2 a regular
SD and a Micro SD UHS 2 uh portable ssds
in two and 4 terab flavors as well as support for CF Express 4.0 type A and
type B with backwards compatible for CF Express 2.0 we also got a Thunderbolt
cable they say this is a is this a a gan brick yeah okay 140 W Gan brick and then
adapters that I don't need for international plugs yep that's a short
cable Thunderbolt 4 has some issues
we've overlooked something haven't we in the Box you might have noticed
there isn't a single module yeah just
like the old one it's not a a cheap solution the SD card module is going to
cost you around 50 bucks the CF Express modules are around 100 bucks and the
ssds are $300 and $500 respectively for
the different capacities all right and in terms of
included accessories they just come with a USB cable and then the little modular
reader itself so just like the old generation one you can use USBC and use
it as a standalone device or you can
slot it right into our reader here is it Direct agnostic can I just put it in
either way I want oh yeah okay cool it seems to not care but all the text goes
this way so I'm going to keep it consistent oh this is a 40 GB per second
module cool let's put it in that side oh okay I got a 2 tby SSD let's go ahead
and throw that in a 40 GB per second module CF Express is so fraking
expensive this CF Express type B card one terabyte is
$1,000 and I don't think Lexar is even that out of touch with the market
reality for this one like it's just these are these are really expensive
cards do I wonder why that standard hasn't really taken off Christmas party
yeah yeah for sure buddy one last thing they also include a type A to type c
adapter in the Box all right I'm going to put my type A in the other 40 GB per
second slot there we go do I have a micro SD yeah oh there was one that was
still in box that I could have unboxed all right well there you go that's the
unboxing experience man did they send over all of this media for this
video dude do they know that I would have done this for not the sponsorship
for just like this really expensive media cut that cut that all right got
all the Lexar baby dude what you can
have 36 card readers on a single port
not to mention that some of them are dual like SD and micro SD ones
ridiculous okay so some of these have some stuff on them right hey look at
that all footage 472 gabes okay here we
go 23 gigs let's go good gravy
2.6 gigabytes that's with a big b
gigabytes per second we are moving around 10 of gig files just like they
are nothing what kind of speeds are we going to get on our SD cards let's try
let's try copying one of these files to our SD card uh let's go with our
fullsize SD not bad not bad 20 200 200
and something megabytes a second dude I know for those of you who don't care
this is not going to be that exciting but for those of us who do care being
able to move footage around quickly and seamlessly is a huge deal there you go
there you go see that the big number is off the graph now so we can actually see
the SD card transfer now let's say that we wanted to transport some footage back
with us okay so we've got that what was that like a 30 gig file or something
like that on our SD card uh it's pretty typical for us to carry something back
if the camera operator is traveling separately or to make two copies so if
two people are traveling each of them has has one and using a portable SSD
like this is a really good way to do that so I'm just going to rip one of my
uh CF Express card readers out I'm going to throw that SSD in there and then I'm
going to copy from my SD card to my portable SSD sorry it was 15 gigs 15
gigs she's cooking at around 240 250
megabytes a second which is about what we'd expect for a v90 SD card of course
that's not as fast as this SSD can go but we'll wait until this is done first
now let's try pulling off of our our CF Express type
B and throwing that onto our
SSD man this makes me wish we did shoot on CF Express I don't want to pay for CF
Express but boy do I ever like the speeds like yeah just casual 850
megabytes a second no problem we shoot
that uh we shoot Tech link on them we shoot TechLink on CF Express why in just
speed oh for exactly this reason because
TechLinked is edited and uploaded the same day it's shot every second count so
sitting and waiting you know 10 15 20 minutes for inest not really an option
especially when you can do it instantly like this all right now let's take one
of those files let's take our 23 gig file and copy it off of our SSD onto our
desktop okay it looks like this SSD will do anywhere in the neighborhood of
around 850 to 900 megabytes a second whether
we're reading or writing that's a little shy of what Lexar said we might be able
to in the real world but still fast enough that you are able to move footage
around extremely quickly Lexar wanted us to point out that the SSD is ip68 water
resistant and comes with a 5-year warranty and the rest of the modules
come with three-year warranties and include appropriately rated USBC cables
you can't take that for granted anymore so the CF Express ones come with 40 GB
per second rated ones and the SD ones come with 10 GB per second rated ones I
for one am super happy to see this back
I know that this won't be that meaningful to some of you but to me it
is a pretty freaking big deal it might
be too much to ask but I'd love to see Lexar expand the lineup I mean it's just
Thunderbolt and USB ports so conceivably
nothing would prevent someone from you know creating a a third-party USB
accessory USB hob or something like that that plugs into it if it's sitting on
the desk right next to your computer or uh a carrier sled that allows you to put
an m.2 drive in and then just kind of close it up and pop it in there I mean
the guy is kind of the limit when it comes to modular stuff like this just
got to see the ecosystem be built out and don't make me wait 9 years for an
update it's not cheap but it is something that as you guys can see I
mean it wasn't cheap last time if you have the workflow for it it can be worth
it even though it's uh what is it $600 for the dock this time around yeah like
I said like I said before not cheap but
uh definitely cool thanks Lexar for for sponsoring
this video and sending over these goodies thank you guys for watching
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