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IOGEAR 3-Slot SD Card and MicroSD Card Reader with USB-C - TESTED & REVIEWED!
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May 30, 2025
If you own a 2016 or 2017 Apple MacBook Pro or any other computer where the card slots have vanished and it's a parade of USB-C ports instead, you're going to be mighty interested in the fast, inexpensive IOGEAR 3-card portable reader. With, you guessed it, USB-C connectivity and USB 3.1 performance. Tech expert Dave Taylor of https://ww.AskDaveTaylor.com/ shows you how it works and offers live demos of reading and writing data to both a MicroSD and SDCard disk from his own MacBook Pro. And while it's not breathtakingly fast, it's not slow either, as you'll see. Learn more: https://www.IOgear.com/
View Video Transcript
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is this the solution to all the hassles
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with reading cards on the new Macbook
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Pro let's find
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[Music]
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out Dave Taylor here and I want to talk
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about cards not business cards not
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playing cards data cards the kind of
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cards you get in cameras GoPros all that
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sort of stuff now most of these devices
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have little plugs and you can hook it up
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to your computer but that's generally a
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pretty slow way to pull the data off
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enter card readers now older computers
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will have card readers built into them
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pretty handy but if you have something
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like this the latest MacBook Pro it not
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only doesn't have USB it doesn't have
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anything really it's just USBC so enter
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the iio gear three slot card reader
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which supports SD micro SD and compact
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flash now actually it supports eight
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different formats cuz SD and micro SD
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can also be an HC which is High Capacity
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or XC which is extended capacity so you
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have lots of options there and there's
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also something called high-speed compact
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flash so this supports eight different
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card formats in three different card
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sizes and I have actually a Micro SD
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card already in it and it's a really
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simple slick device you plug it into
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your MacBook Pro you plug it into any
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computer with a USBC and it just starts
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working so let me not talk about it
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let's actually jump in and run some
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demos okay our first test is going to be
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to take this 500 megab file off of a
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micro SD card and simply copy it onto
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the desktop let's see how long that
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[Music]
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takes that's pretty darn fast now let's
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switch to the desktop and let's do it by
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size and let's copy it back onto the
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drive so we're just going to do this and
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we'll see how long this Direction takes
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so now we're doing a write instead of a
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read and it's half of a
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gigabyte and let's see you know
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obviously this is constrained by the
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speed of the micro SD card
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itself but not too bad you can see um
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getting a little in window into all the
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other files that I have on my desktop
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but that's
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okay okay for test number two what I
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have here is I have an SD card out of my
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Canon camera and you can see it has a
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really weird file organization but the
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good news is that overall we can see
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that it's 1 gigabyte of data so let's
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just copy that onto the desktop and see
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how long it takes to pull a gig of data
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off of a big SD
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card now this is actually an SDHC so it
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means that it's high capacity and it's a
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16 gig card card so we're pulling off
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116th of all the data on this card and
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it's a fairly complicated organization
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but that's okay you know who cares how
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things are organized in terms of folders
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and files we're just looking at the
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overall data transfer rate and 2 minutes
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to copy a gig it's not going to break
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any records here in terms of throughput
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and it certainly makes me wonder about
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that 5 GB per second but we'll assume
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this is the theoretical maximum for this
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oh and it's speeding up a little bit
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maybe the cache is kicking in so that's
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good so let's get this on
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here almost done you can do it come on
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little card reader come on little card
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reader you're almost
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there now let's go to the desktop let's
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find that 500 megabytes and let's copy
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it onto the SD card let's see how long
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this takes so you can compare this right
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speed to the right speed of the micro SD
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card that we used
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earlier there you go Mac
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OS so this is substantially faster and
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that's going to be something you'll see
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is that different cards actually have
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different read WR rates and if it's
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important for you to be writing data to
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your cards as well as read reading the
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data then you're going to want to get a
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faster card and you can look it up
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there's different number schemes that
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indicate throughput rates but for
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reading data this is certainly quite
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functional works great in the field and
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there's really nothing to complain about
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with this particular unit and looks like
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we're just about done with the data copy
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so as soon as that's done we'll switch
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the camera back around and I'll tell you
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just a tiny bit more about this
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particular IO gear device
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when it's done
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copying which will happen
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soon so super fast I really like it and
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here's the great thing is that I me
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unplug it and show it to you again it's
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only1 1999 I mean it is a no-brainer
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purchase and this is really a best of
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breed with card readers because they
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have ones that have more slots and stuff
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but honestly I don't even have a compact
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flash let alone other card formats so
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I'm guessing that you're like me is that
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between SD and micro SD you got
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everything covered and if you don't then
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there's also adapters that probably came
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with your weird format um cards but be
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that as it may I really like this this
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is the iio Gear 3 slot card reader now
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the only criticism I have is that there
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are no status lights at all so you have
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no idea when it's online it doesn't
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flash when it's reading or anything but
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honestly that's not really an issue I
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mean you're using it on your computer
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you can see when it's finished a
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download or a copy or you finished
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writing some data to your card anyway
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that's it so you can check it out it's
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1999 iio gear 33 slot cardreader at iio
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gear.com this is Dave Taylor and I will
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for sure catch you in my next video
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particularly if you click the Subscribe
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button all right awesome thanks
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[Music]