86 PCWorld SEPTEMBER 2020FEATURE YOUR LAPTOP’S SD CARD READER
probably 45 minutes. That’s time lost on the
editing process.BOTTOM LINE
The first takeaway from this is that clearly, not
all laptop SD card readers are created equal.
All four of the laptops we tested are current
models introduced this year, yet we see a
huge swing in performance.
The second takeaway is, stop turning
up your nose at USB card readers. We’ve
talked to content creators who
see a lack of an onboard SD
reader as a reason not to buy a
particular laptop. But you just
don’t know what level of card
reader you’re going to get, even
on new laptops. So just buy a
verifiably good external reader
and don’t look back.
The third recommendation is
not to get too caught up in
wanting UHS-III. Some new
laptops have touted UHS-III
support as a bullet point, and to
be fair, the Dell XPS 15 9500’s
UHS-III reader on the PCie 3.0
bus was consistently the fastest in
our tests. It’s just not clear that
the standard will matter if card
makers skip UHS-III cards for
SD Express.
Our final takeaway is this really
matters only if you care aboutperformance: to have a fast SD card reader in
your laptop, and feed it with a fast SD card. For
example, if you look at the picture below, the
128GB Sony UHS-I card will read at a dismal
45MBps and write at 36MBps on the Dell XPS
15 9500. The Lexar UHS-II card will read at
153MBps and write at 71MBps, while the
SanDisk Extreme Pro will read at 279MBps and
write at 217MBps. So don’t feed a fast laptop a
slow card, and don’t feed a slow laptop a fast
card, if you care about performance.The speed of your laptop’s SD card won’t matter if you only feed
it slow 40MBps cards like the 128GB Sony UHS-I card here. Run
a UHS-II card such as the 128GB SanDisk Extreme Pro, which can
hit 300MBps, or even the Lexar card which can reach 150MBps.