Performance

The Workflow SD Reader is a USB 3.2 Gen 1 (USB 3.0) unit and allows for USH-II read/write speeds. I had the provided Kingston Canvas React Plus SD card in the reader unit slotted into the Workflow Station, which is in turn connected to a USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C port on my desktop. The SD card is rated for up to 300 Mbps read with its accompanying USB reader, so it is nice to see no loss in performance in this tested configuration. Indeed, sequential read and write speeds are excellent and great for workflow operations related to content creation, which is a testament to the Workflow Station as well as the SD card. Random write/read speeds take a beating here, of course, but that's to be expected with such storage devices in general. Using Blackmagic Design's Desktop Studio Speed Test on the SD card in this configuration also yields pretty good results and shows exactly where the limitation is for video makers, wherein you really need dedicated SSDs for the highest demanding workloads anyway.


The Workflow microSD Reader is similar, being a USB 3.2 Gen 1 unit that supports UHS-II microSD cards while being backwards compatible with UHS-I. In a similar configuration as the SD card, I had the Kingston Canvas React Plus microSD card inside the appropriate reader, which had been slotted into the Workflow Station. The card is rated for up to 285 Mbps read speeds, and CrystalDiskMark says it does one better! BlackMagicDesign also shows that the microSD card in this configuration outperforms the SD card in some metrics, but you of course have less native compatibility for this form factor compared to the full-size SD card.


SD and microSD card performance was so identical that I ended up using the SD card in a series of different test configurations, and normalized the results for a single relative performance where the highest net average was 100%. Given the memory cards are not going to saturate USB 3.1 Gen 2 at all, doing the test on a Gen 2x2 port was probably just academic going in, and the results show as much. In fact, going from USB 3.2 Gen 1 to USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, there are no real differences with most client memory cards and USB drives as only error margins separate them. What is nice to see is that there are no drops in perceived performance between a native USB connection to the readers in a standalone mode and readers in the powered USB hub of the Kingston Workflow Station. This is where the increased bandwidth feeding the Workflow Station comes in handy since the readers are constrained to USB 3.2 Gen 1 speeds anyway. It is only when you drop down to more mediocre readers that you see a big performance drop, so definitely don't handicap your high-speed USB drives/memory cards by using lesser readers.