In this day and age, there are multiple ways for us to move data around, may it be through wires, over-the-air or through a network. However, I believe it’s safe to say that the most confident way that people find transferring data is using a device that could easily read and write data. In addition to that, the world is slowly being introduced to USB Type-C which could possibly replace all this USBs that we have been using over the years and keep one singular port that everyone can play together on. But what about those of you that are stuck in between? Having devices that both support normal USB and USB Type-C could be a hassle as I have experienced first hand with the devices I have at home. Kingston has thought about this and has released the Kingston MobileLite Duo 3C reader which supports the reading and writing of an SD card and allows you to utilize either the USB Type-C port or the USB Type-A port which the device has.
The SD card that I will be using is a Gold Class Kingston microSDXC with read and write speeds of 90MB/s and 45MB/s respectively. Just for the sake of the test, I have done a speed test on the SDcard and found that the speeds match what Kingston has promised as you can see the image below.
Now that we know the SD card is in proper working order lets move back to the reader and take a close look at what Kingston has offered.
As promised here is the USB Type-A port on one end which does support USB 3.1, so that would give us more than enough transfer speeds to test it with the SD card. On the other end is the USB Type-C port for devices that support it. If you look just above it, there is a slot where the microSD card would slot in, allowing both the ports to use it.
First off, I just want to highlight how much I love this design as the form factor makes it look like a pen drive that you can change storage sizes by just swapping out the SD card, and to add to that it protects the USB Type-C port and the SD together when placing on the cap. It’s a unique implementation and I love how easy it is to swap SD cards at any time.
Let’s hook it up to a computer and test out the speeds of the SD card when plugged into the reader. Remember, we want to try to get the speeds based on the image above or at least as close as possible that the difference will not be noticeable.
The reading speeds is great even exceeding what Kingston promised but the writing speeds in about 10MB/s slower than expected which is still not a huge problem but I did like to see the speed to be about 5MB/s indifference but overall making it pretty decent if you are going to write bigger files to it.
Now for the fun part, because it has a USB Type-C port, it should be able to be detected by my phone which has the same port.
As soon as I plugged it in, my phone prompted that there is a USB device connected and allowed me to browse through the contents of the SD card via the reader which Kingston has also mentioned that it should be able to do on a smartphone.
