CalDigit SOHO DOCK SD+microSD real life speed

[joevt]

If you have another SD cards maybe you can write to microSD V90 and another SD card ~10GB data. After that copy from two cards to Mac. Activity Monitor in "Disk" you will see speed of disk whrite if you dont have another monotiring app who show each disk/card speed.

If speed will be more what you get from single microSD cards read speed (from your test it was 276-290MB/s) it's will be WIN!

Bad news. Reading from two SD cards in the CalDigit SOHO is slower than reading from a single SD card. Very disappointing. I guess the SD Card Reader USB device is not smart enough to handle two devices at the same time efficiently. Maybe this is something UASP would help with.

I received a SanDisk Extreme PRO SDHC UHS-II Card 32 GB (300/260 MB/s read/write). It comes formatted as FAT32 (274/64 MB/s read/write) with MBR. I don't know why macOS has slow writes in these benchmarks but we care more about the read speeds. I reformatted the SD card as HFS+ (296/120) with GPT.

ATTO Disk Benchmark.app gets similar numbers as AmorphousDiskMark.app for single SD card (write speed might be better in ATTO because we're just writing zeros). When I switch to dual SD Card, the numbers go down to 115/53 MB/s read/write.

The Finder test is not as bad. It's 274 MB/s for a single SD card and 245 MB/s for two SD cards for reading. I think it was around 100 MB/s for writing. The files used are 76 screenshots of various sizes between 4 KB and 269 MB duplicated 15 times. 11.24 GB total.

So I guess now the question is, does any dual slot SD card reader behave better?

Maybe a dual slot SD card reader that is a single USB device exists that has ideal behavior but the CalDigit SOHO is not one of them.

An SD card reader that consists of two separate SD card reader USB devices connected to a USB hub should be ideal but do any such SD card readers exist? Maybe the Prograde is one of those.

I've attached some screenshots. I edited the Finder screenshots by removing the background so the .png files would compress better.

 

[EzisAA]

Bad news. Reading from two SD cards in the CalDigit SOHO is slower than reading from a single SD card. Very disappointing. I guess the SD Card Reader USB device is not smart enough to handle two devices at the same time efficiently. Maybe this is something UASP would help with.

I received a SanDisk Extreme PRO SDHC UHS-II Card 32 GB (300/260 MB/s read/write). It comes formatted as FAT32 (274/64 MB/s read/write) with MBR. I don't know why macOS has slow writes in these benchmarks but we care more about the read speeds. I reformatted the SD card as HFS+ (296/120) with GPT.

ATTO Disk Benchmark.app gets similar numbers as AmorphousDiskMark.app for single SD card (write speed might be better in ATTO because we're just writing zeros). When I switch to dual SD Card, the numbers go down to 115/53 MB/s read/write.

The Finder test is not as bad. It's 274 MB/s for a single SD card and 245 MB/s for two SD cards for reading. I think it was around 100 MB/s for writing. The files used are 76 screenshots of various sizes between 4 KB and 269 MB duplicated 15 times. 11.24 GB total.

So I guess now the question is, does any dual slot SD card reader behave better?

Maybe a dual slot SD card reader that is a single USB device exists that has ideal behavior but the CalDigit SOHO is not one of them.

An SD card reader that consists of two separate SD card reader USB devices connected to a USB hub should be ideal but do any such SD card readers exist? Maybe the Prograde is one of those.

I've attached some screenshots. I edited the Finder screenshots by removing the background so the .png files would compress better.

Thanks! 245MB/s... 🥲

 

[joevt]

I received another SD card. It's a Kingston 32GB SDXC Canvas React Plus 300MB/s Read UHS-II, C10, U3, V90 Memory Card (MLPR2/32GBCR)

It comes with an SD card reader (USB 3.0 Type A - ATECH FLASH TECHNOLOGY, 11b0:3306). It's also not UASP.

I used the Kingston SD card in the SD card reader it came in and connected it to the CalDigit SOHO.
The SD card is formatted MBR and FAT32. 259/47 MB/s read/write.
I formatted it GPT HFS+. 291/83 MB/s

ATTO Disk Benchmark with the Kingston and the SanDisk at the same time gives max 395/436 MB/s read/write. So it's at least better than a single SD card. Seems like it would take 3 SD cards to surpass the USB 3.0 barrier - the CalDigit SOHO has a free USB-C port that could accomodate that. The 10 Gbps max of the hub should be more than sufficient.

In that test, the SanDisk is doing 198/239 and the Kingston is doing 204/198. It's a drop from the ideal single card speeds. I suppose it might be faster if the SD cards were connected to separate USB controllers. My Mac mini 2018 has 3 USB controllers (not counting the ones from Thunderbolt devices) so I gave it a try.

Two USB controllers, one SD card each (SanDisk max:261/207 and Kingston max:297/187): max total 557/380 MB/s read/write.

 

[joevt]

I also tested same two SD card readers with two ports of the same USB controller (one of the two Titan Ridge USB controllers of the Mac mini 2018).
Max total 546/356 MB/s read/write. So it's almost as good as two separate USB controllers (549/442 in a second iteration of that test; 557/380 in the first iteration noted in my previous post) - and still better than a USB hub (395/436) for the two separate SD card readers.

So for best performance, get a bunch of single slot SD card readers and connect each one to a separate USB controller.

An older Thunderbolt dock (with Alpine Ridge) such as the CalDigit TS3+ or OWC Thunderbolt 3 dock has 4 separate USB controllers: two FL1100, one ASM1142, and the Alpine Ridge USB controller. The FL1100 USB controllers cannot do 500 MB/s so you'll want to connect only one SD card reader to each of those FL1100 controllers.

Newer Thunderbolt 3/4 docks (Titan Ridge / Goshen Ridge) only have one USB controller/port - everything is connected via internal USB hub.

 

[EzisAA]

Littel update.

ProGrade UHS-II MicroSD card reader have a bulit-in hub.

So Reader is 10Gb/s conection and them split two 5Gb/s link to each cards.
Work graet - for speed test I use microSD USH-II V60 from ProGrade and Samsung EVO Plus (UHS-I)

So no problem copy files from two cards in same time. Cards work basical on full speed ~ 350MB/s (UHS-I + UHS-II). Next stop will be all my Samsung Evo plus UHS-I microSD cards change to ProGrade v60 UHS-II microSD cards to get more speed.

Also if you some days need a USB storeg and you don't have USB flesh or externals hard drive, you can make from two microSD cards RAID-0 (why? because you can ?)

Two Samsung EVO Plus 128GB in Raid-0, You will get ~170MB/s write and ~180MB/s read (255GB storeg).