Testing:

The performance of a card reader is a bit of an odd thing to test, since it will all depend on what cards you plan to use with it. That said, I decided to take the 32GB Class 10 SDHC card provided with the review sample and quickly test it against a Kingston UHS-I U3 64GB SDXC card that we reviewed last year. It seemed obvious that the SDXC would be faster, but I decided to see which was truly faster when installed in the FCR-HS4 according to USB Flash Benchmark. With that information, I would then use the faster card to compare performance results between the FCR-HS4 and Kingston's MobileLite G3 when run through CrystalDiskMark and ATTO Disk Benchmark.

USB Flash Benchmark:

What we see below is that the read speeds are shown in green, while write speeds are shown in red. The solid, heavyweight lines are for the 32GB Class 10 card, while the lighter dashed lines are for the 64GB UHS-I U3 card. The 64GB is much faster than the 32GB card, but both are putting up figures that jive with their advertised speeds.



We'll proceed through the rest of the tests using the 64GB UHS-I card in order to compare the performance of the FCR-HS4 to the MobileLite G3.