2013-09-29 MacBook Air 2013 SD card speed test

Since the SD card slot on the 2013 MacBook Air is connected via the USB 3 bus (instead of USB 2), it shouldn't be limited anymore by USB2 speeds (i.e. theoretical maximum of 480 Mbit/s). The new limit is 5 Gb/s.

So I ran a little test of whatever I've got lying around. I used the Black Magic disk speed test, with a 1 GB test file.

Card Read speed Write speed Remarks
SanDisk 2 GB micro-SD card 17.4 MB/s 3.4 MB/s Came with my Android phone
Kingmax 16 GB micro-SD card21.0 MB/s 9.3 MB/s Bought to replace the small SD card above
Nikon-branded 2GB SD card11.3 MB/s 5.6 MB/s Came with my Nikon point-and-shoot camera
No-name 2GB SD 13.7 MB/s 5.2 MB/s

It's not a very interesting test; none of these is above the theoretical maximum of 60 MB/s for USB 2.