If you are a professional photographer or content creator, you have a lot to do with SD cards. Sometimes, after an extensive shoot, it can’t be quick enough to copy the data from SD cards.
If you are one of these users, Angelbird offers an exciting product with its SD DUAL CARD READER.
As the name suggests, this is a card reader with two slots that are intended to offer the full UHS-II speed.
This in a “professional” design. Certainly a super exotic product, but we still want to take a look at it in a little test!
At this point, many thanks to Angelbird for providing the SD DUAL CARD READER for this test!
Angelbird SD DUAL CARD READER in a short test
The Angelbird SD DUAL CARD READER has a professional design. The card reader measures 95 x 65 x 12 mm and is made entirely of metal.
This makes it appear very valuable and solid, which is rare for card readers.
The important thing about this model are the two SD card slots on the front. These are positioned slightly offset so that you can easily remove the SD cards individually. Each card slot has a status LED.
The card reader is connected via USB C. A corresponding port is on the back. This port is slightly offset in the case.
This means the port has good strain relief, but not every USB C cable will fit! A high-quality cable is included in the scope of delivery.
Write protection switch
The Angelbird SD DUAL CARD READER has a write protection switch on the back for each of the two SD slots.
What is this for? If you use the card reader in an “ingest station” you can prevent accidental deletion of memory cards.
The fastest SD card reader
How fast is the Angelbird SD DUAL CARD READER? To test this, I grabbed two of the fastest V90 SD cards and tested them in 5x different UHS-II card readers.
The memory cards are:
Angelbird AV PRO SD MK2 V90 R300/W280
Lexar Professional 2000x Gold Series 128GB
The card readers are the following models:
Angelbird SD DUAL CARD READER
Kingston FCR-HS4
ProGrade CFexpress Type A and SDXC/SDHC UHS-II
Sonnett Echo 20 Thunderbolt 4
Sony MRW-G2
Strictly speaking, the Sonnett Echo 20 Thunderbolt 4 is not just a card reader, but a Thunderbolt 4 dock with a good card reader.
The speed was tested with CrystalDiskMark.
In terms of reading, the Angelbird SD DUAL CARD READER is a close second behind the Sonnett Echo 20 Thunderbolt 4 Dock.
The Angelbird card reader achieved an average reading speed of 296.6 MB/s and the Sonnett Dock 298.3 MB/s.
The other card readers were sometimes noticeably slower.
But what does it look like when written?
Here is the Angelbird SD DUAL CARD READER in front of the Sonnett Dock in first place.
So the bottom line is that the Angelbird SD DUAL CARD READER is fast, very fast!
Full performance even with two memory cards?
You can read/write two SD cards at the same time with the Angelbird SD DUAL CARD READER.
This too, almost at full speed! In practice we seem to be limited to a maximum of +- 500 MB/s in total.
Conclusion
The Angelbird SD DUAL CARD READER is of course a super exotic model! However, if you’re looking for potentially the fastest SD card reader on the market, then you’ve come to the right place!
In the test, only the Sonnett Echo 20 Thunderbolt 4 was able to keep up, but this is also a complete Thunderbolt dock.
So a very strong presentation of the Angelbird card reader.