Sandisk ImageMate All-In-One USB3 Card Reader Unboxing & Speed Comparison
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
943 words · ~4 min read
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the Corsair carbide air 540 High airflow Cube case is great for air cooling or
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liquid cooling check the link in the video description to learn
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more welcome to my unboxing of the image made all-in-one USB 3 reader and writer
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yes it reads it writes it slices it dices and you might think that okay
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unboxing something like a card reader is sort of pointless but I'm going to be
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100% truthful with you guys I needed one
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and you might say well why did you need one every notebook ever made has a
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built-in card reader and card readers aren't that expensive and you could just
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sort of get one well the truth of the matter is that commodity card readers
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the USB 2 variety just aren't really fast enough for us these days so having
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something that runs off of USB 3 makes a significant difference when you're
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copying anywhere from you know 16 gigs to 32 gigs or more of data at a time off
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of cards onto something else so in order
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to sort of do a practical demonstration of what kind of a difference this will
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make we're going to walk through the product itself which is actually kind of
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kind of nice looking I like the ID here so it's got a little metal stand here it
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actually has some heft to it so it's got three little rubber feet on the bottom
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go ahead and put that wherever you want then it has three plugs on the front so
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we've got compact flash SDHC XC MMC if
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seriously is anyone still using MMC go home um Ms Pro Duo produo all that good
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stuff so memory stick if you still use those and micro SD XC or HC or whatever
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you want in the top at the back you find a usb3 micro interface which I still
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hate but there doesn't really seem to be any getting around it when it comes to
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things like external usb3 devices that need a slim connector so in this case
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they wanted to go for a slim sexy form factor so that is what we end up with
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the bad or well okay what I was afraid was going to be the bad news about this
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product is that USB 3 cables are quite bulky they do have more pins than usb2
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cables so I was worried that what was going to happen is it was just going to tip this over but the weight of the
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stand on the bottom does seem to prevent that from happening so that's almost
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unless you put all the weight of the cable behind it so there you go micro SD
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cards these days we've got the latest SanDisk Extreme UHS 164 Gig micro SD
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card we're going to throw that in an adapter since most notebooks don't
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really support um like dedicated micro USD
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slots for the most part this is why it's still handy especially for us where
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we're using different media such as compact flash or whatever else I'm going
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to go ahead and copy the smaller of these two files to the desktop copy and
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replace yep so let's go ahead and see how long it takes on USB 2 we're going
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to see speeds in the neighborhood of around 18 to 19 megabytes per second
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maybe 20 megabytes per second sustained
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and so yeah there's the convenience of having the different slots and being
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able to plug multiple Cards into them at the same time and there's also a speed advantage now this is a Micro SD card if
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we were looking at a very high performance full-sized SD card we'd be
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able to more effectively leverage the additional bandwidth that usb3 affords
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us but it's just for the sake of you know doing a quick and dirty demo to
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show that there is a difference even with a Micro SD slot we're going to go
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ahead and plug this micro SD card into our card reader which is already plugged
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into the PC there we go hopefully
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that'll get detected pretty quick we're going to take that same file and we're
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going to overwrite it again and see if we do get things going on a
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little bit faster here there we go so funny story when we were trying
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that demo before filming it we accidentally had the card reader plugged
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into a USB 2 Port which means we were seeing exactly the same bottleneck so we
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were well not quite the same bottleneck because it's still a better performing
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card reader so we were seeing around 22 23 megabytes per second and we hadn't
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actually looked up the specs of this particular SD card because we only got
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it in order to demo that USB 3 is faster
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so we were like oh sand disc sent us a Micro SD that's kind of weird so we
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didn't know it was actually going to be around 80 megabytes per second sustained
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reads which it turned out to be which was a very effective demo for how much
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faster USB 3 is so there you have it guys we're not perfect but sometimes it
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works out anyway like the video if you liked the video dislike it if you didn't
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leave a comment if you were somewhere in between and as always guys don't forget
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subscribe
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