ProGrade Announces New Dual SD/MicroSD UHS-II Card Reader with Faster Transfer Speeds

With media cards getting faster in order to accommodate higher resolution media files, it becomes imperative to have a faster card reader to transfer your data effectively. ProGrade has announced a new dual SD/microSD UHS-II media card reader with transfer speeds as high as 625 MB/s.

“A new wave of content creators has emerged over the last couple of years, driven strongly by sharing platforms such as YouTube and TikTok.

A large portion of these creators are operating in a highly mobile environment, utilizing a variety of devices such as smartphones, tablets, and lightweight laptops for video editing along with powerful new editing software applications,” said Wes Brewer, CEO, and founder of ProGrade Digital.

Image Credit – ProGrade

“To better support these users, we have developed our new dual-slot SD/microSD card reader (PGM0.5) that can provide a highly portable, high-speed way to import all of this content directly into mobile editing platforms at a very affordable new price point.”

Connecting to a computer through a USB 3.2 Gen 1 USB-C connection, the ProGrade PGM0.5 UHS-II media card reader can be used with mobile devices that support USB-C, as well as desktop computers.

The USB-C connection is integrated into the device, so connections don’t require an additional cable which could bog down the data transfer rate if it’s of a cheaper variety.

Image Credit – ProGrade

The reader may also be compatible with other UHS-I cards from SanDisk. In a recent report by DIY Photography, the photo site discovered that the new reader was capable of supporting SanDisk’s Extreme UHS-I protocol with read/write speeds of up to 100MB/s ad 164MS/s respectively.

This is interesting because the protocol used by SanDisk is generally considered proprietary.

Image Credit – ProGrade

Could this mean that SanDisk is opening up its protocols to be open source or perhaps ProGrade has licensed the technology to further expand the reader’s capabilities? Or perhaps, this is just a fluke of the ProGrade design?

And does it even matter? Well, it could be should SanDisk decide to issue a cease and desist for tapping into their disc transfer protocols. But why would they bother, since using the protocol supports SanDisk Extreme Pro media cards?

The ProGrade Digital PGM0.5 UHS-II media card reader is available now for $35, and it comes with a two-year warranty. But users should probably jump on this quick, because if SanDisk decides to make an issue of the reader’s Extreme capability, then it’ll likely get pulled in favor of a more inferior design.

[source: ProGrade Digital]

Order Links:

  • Prograde Digital PGM05 UHS-II Media Card Reader (Adorama)

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