If you’re a photographer, a gadget that manages and reads your SD cards at the speeds they’re supposed to work at can be critical to your workflow. Most on-board card readers on laptops and USB-C docks can turn out to be slow, but you don’t need to spend much to get blazing fast speeds from your card.
You could 3D print a simple memory card holder to fix your physical storage woes, but that still leaves you without a good card reader. Luckily, I found a $10 gadget that does both things at the same time.
The memory card storage problem
Juggling cards can wreck your workflow
While memory cards can store a ton of your photos, videos, and data, storing memory cards themselves is a bit of a hassle. They’re easy to lose if you drop them in a backpack or camera bag, and can get scratched or dusty if kept lying around. You could fix this by getting a memory card holder of sorts, but you’ll constantly run into the issue of forgetting either your memory cards or your memory card reader at home, as I have many times.
So far, I was relying on the built-in card reader on my laptop for reading data and two lens caps screwed together for storing my cards. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it worked. However, when I switched to my current laptop, it didn’t come with an SD card slot. This wasn’t a problem at home because I have a USB-C hub with SD and microSD card slots. But if I’m out, this forced me to carry the rather large hub everywhere just for one feature.
This is when I came across the Portronics Mport 30 Plus. I was only looking for a USB-C card reader. What I found instead was a solution for both storing and reading my SD and microSD cards. I picked it up for around ₹850 from a camera store, roughly $10. You can also find it for as low as $3.50 on Amazon or for a similar price on Portronic’s website.
Small gadget, big fix
A simple tool that saves time, space, and sanity
Portronics isn’t necessarily the most popular brand when it comes to tech peripherals, but they’ve certainly hit it out of the park with this one. It’s a rather simple concept, one that makes me wonder why bigger manufacturers haven’t done this yet.
The entire card reader body is roughly the size of a credit card. There’s a flat surface with a flap that opens to reveal the card storage section. You can store one SD card, two microSD cards, one nano SIM, and a SIM removal tool. The flap shuts down pretty tight and has held up for over a year of repeated use.
It’s an all-plastic body, but the build quality is good for the price. Cards easily slide in and out of their slots and remain in place no matter how roughly you treat the outer body. You can snap the lid’s hinge if you press hard enough in the wrong direction, but you’ll still be able to store cards in it, as the storage compartment keeps the metal contacts on your card downwards.
For the card reader itself, it slides out as a dongle with a USB-A port on one side and a USB-C port on the other. This is great, as you can plug the reader into just about every device. I’ve used the card reader on my Windows laptop, Android phone, Linux laptop, MacBook, iPad, and iPhone, and it worked equally well.
It has a dual-port design with slots for an SD and a microSD card that can work simultaneously. However, you will notice reduced speeds if you’re reading two cards at once. I don’t often use the two slots together, but you can if you need to.
Apart from device compatibility and no need for an external USB-A to USB-C conversion dongle, the USB-C port also helps greatly with data transfer speeds. I’ve found that traditional USB-A connections are rarely able to keep up with some of the faster SD and microSD cards on the market. USB-C offers a much higher bandwidth, resulting in faster data transfer speeds.
Your actual data transfer speeds will depend on how fast your device’s USB-C port and your SD or microSD card are. However, you will see faster speeds than your device’s built-in memory card reader in almost every case. Like most SD card readers, this is also plug-and-play, so it should work right after you plug it in. However, there are fixes you can try if your SD card reader won’t show in File Explorer.
Solve two problems for a tiny price
It’s a minimal outlay to fix both of these issues
Overall, it’s a neat little device that solves two problems at once for quite an inexpensive price tag. Instead of fiddling with my cards and then searching for the card reader inside my backpack, I now have one fixed place for both devices, which is rather easy to store and carry.
It protects your memory cards reasonably well and provides decent data transfer speeds. For the price, I wouldn’t expect anything else. So if you’re tired of the memory card shuffle and want to bring some order to your storage workflow, this little gadget might just be the solution you didn’t know you needed.
