Kingston Duo 3C - magic wand for microSD memory cards

    Whatever Jobs is a genius, microSD on the phone is awesome. Of course, taking away the possibility of expanding the memory of users, Apple has greatly increased the popularity of its cloud services, subscriptions and expensive versions of smartphones with normal amounts of embedded data storage. Moreover, many vendors picked up the trend, and some time ago to find a smartphone with a slot for MicroSD was a real epic.



    Fortunately, we have USB-OTG and Kingston Duo 3C: perhaps not a convenient way to add extra gigabytes to the gadget, like a regular connector, but much more universal.

    Memory Cards in Mobile Gadgets


    The memory card slot in smartphones is a variable thing. When the built-in memory was expensive, and MicroSD was the only suitable way to establish a sufficient storage capacity - they were used, despite the fashion trends in the market and the aggressive policy of the apple company. Everyone didn’t care about Jobs’s opinion, and the memory card slot was an advantage over iPhones — 2-4 of its own, yes 4-8 added, and a file manager for every taste ... Today, 16 GB is the most common size, 32-64 are considered the norm , but 128 and even 256 are no longer scary with their volumes.



    Unfortunately, in the world of Android devices, not only memory cards flourished, but also platform fragmentation that accompanied the rapid growth of smartphones. Dozens of competing technologies with minimal differences tried to win a place under the sun.in memory of the device. Applications from year to year continued to gain weight, and the functionality of memory cards did not develop in any way, which aggravated the existing problems associated with the placement of data in smartphones. In addition, the price of fast embedded memory has fallen. Some vendors chose Apple and abandoned their card readers, others picked up this disastrous trend.

    The darkest hours come before dawn. Powerful cameras in smartphones, high-quality audio chips that can truly uncover headphones above average and clearly show the difference between mp3 and loseless formats and voluminous games on mobiles have breathed new life into memory cards. There were new APIs in Android that taught the system how to work with external memory as if it was in the phone from the factory: special formatting, file system encryption and integration with a built-in storage device turned MicroSD from an uncomfortable crutch into a full-fledged way to expand the capabilities of a smartphone. True, we have lost the ability to read this card on a PC, and using it as a backup storage will no longer work.

    Device


    The size of the reader for the most part due to the size of the connectors. USB Type-C and Type-A occupy ⅔ of the space, the rest is the case itself. If the engineers could have made the Kingston Duo 3C even less, they would have done it.



    Since the gadget is present Type-C - will work wherever there is such a connector. For phones and tablets will require support for the standard OTG (now, probably, is at all). Macbooks and other devices earn and so. USB 3.0 Type-A is provided for connecting to PCs and classic laptops. We tested Kingston Duo 3C on four smartphones, three laptops, one tablet, two computers - everywhere I worked without drivers and instantly

    Tests


    The most interesting is speed tests. Since the speed of this thing depends not only on the gadget, but also on the card, it makes sense to test on the fastest of the popular specifications. Previously, memory cards were divided into "classes" (from 1 to 10), now I want the MicroSD XC standard with a new data transfer protocol. The new UHS protocol is divided into three classes 1, 2 and 3: they are backward compatible (newer cards will work in older devices at lower speeds). Unfortunately, now most of the gadgets use UHS-1 (since UHS-2 is more expensive, it requires memory cards with double row of contacts, powerful controllers and connection to shared memory at high speed), so for the tests we will use the most common Class memory card 10 / UHS-1, which usually stands in the Olympus mirrorless.

    Atto Disk benchmark


    We test in the classic ATTO Disk Benchmark utility. Features of the device memory cards make it inappropriate to complete testing (with blocks up to 1 MB so accurately - the results will be near-zero), so we will do with an abbreviated version. Test the card with an array of 1 GB on files from 4 to 32 MB. All tests will be performed five times, the “average” run will be taken for the effective result.



    As a test platform, a Macbook Pro with Windows 8.1 installed on BootCamp, there is no doubt about the speed of its USB 3.0 controller, and there is a built-in card reader to compare with. The flash drive is formatted in the usual exFAT, about 40% of it is occupied by RAW files with photos. To begin with - the results of the laptop itself.



    The best result for reading is 86 MB / s , the record is a modest 11.4 MB / s . At the same time, the graph shows how the read and write speeds decrease with increasing file size — the effect of the small cache of the integrated controller affects. Now we insert the USB stick into the Kingston Duo 3C and repeat the test with the same parameters.



    The difference is obvious. Reading speed increased by 10% - up to 95.1 Mb / s at the peak - not much, but noticeable. The write speed showed a much more serious increase - 5.5 (!) Times, up to 64.5 MB / s space . This is similar to the results from 2017, and not that higher.

    The stability indicators grew even more: if with a test card through an integrated reader, each pass became worse (the card heated up and did not have time to cool down), the aluminum case of the portable device dissipated heat well - the fluctuations of results from benchmark to benchmark did not exceed 5%.

    Mobile phones


    The presence of USB Type-C connector allows you to connect not only to the new-fashioned macbook with one and a half connectors, but also to mobile gadgets based on Android. Sony Xperia XZ Premium is perfect for tests - the golden handsome has its 64 GB connected via the UFS standard, plus the built-in slot for memory cards, but the main thing is its SoC.



    Snapdragon 835 logically must fully support USB 3.0 OTG at full speed. Unfortunately, the recording speed does not set records either on the flagship smartphone or on other models:


    However, there is another question, who is to blame. It is unlikely that drawdowns are provided with a slow memory subsystem or a weak processor, rather, no one just steamed on the topic of multi-threaded writing in a simple file manager running on Android. And there is a little confirmation. Using the Android version of Total Commander made it possible to copy a 3 GB file from the phone in 7 minutes: that is, the write speed was of the order of 7.1-7.2 megabytes per second.

    But with the speed of reading everything is in perfect order "out of the box." The .h264 codec is good at compressing data, a 4K video with 60 frames per second received a bitrate of around 75 MB / s. Not to say that video in 4K @ 60FPS is a common scenario for a mobile phone, but it is reproduced without the slightest stuttering, which means that transferring data from the card is at least as slow as an average laptop.

    That is, you can take a memory card, stick it directly into your mobile gadget and quickly send the footage to the editor or backup to the cloud. Encrypted card with music and personal photos at the same time do not have to get.



    findings


    Kingston Duo 3C is a great little helper in everything that concerns the transfer of information from the device to the device. Send photos from the camera, make a copy from the smartphone, transfer the video to the tablet and mount it, and so on and so forth. It does not take up space, connects to new and old gadgets (and with the MircoUSB Type-A to Type-C adapter - so also to the smartphones of past years), the reading speed is higher than many built-in readers. In general, if you ever needed such a thing, you are probably already looking for where to buy it.





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