Lexar C1 microSD reader Review
With type c ports having been available on almost(samsung cough cough) all of the flagship phones for this year and been a universal shift in certain laptop lines Lexar has taken the time to produce a microSD card reader to keep up with the changing standards. The card ships in a fairly standard blister pack with most of the important information(usb 3.1 gen 1) and OS support although one data point is oddly missing the rated bus speed of the card reader itself, As we have a UHS-II capable card from lexar which we reviewed here we’ll make sure to use it to validate the card readers performance limit. Visually the C1 looks a lot like the microSD readers lexar includes with some of it’s cards and I’ll be surprised if they don’t start offering it in such a capacity especially with the type-c port popping up on professional systems many of which are aimed at photographers and videographers alike.
Starting on android it all simply works, using FX the card reader is recognized as a USB OTG device and other than some complaints about hot swapping cards without explicitly ejecting them things go as intended. Performance feels snappy and doesn’t present any issues other than needing to mount the card as writable which is standard procedure the first time you attach an OTG device with android 6.x and higher.
Performance
The card reader was attached to my 2014 Thinkpad yoga via USBC to USBA adapter(this one which worked great) which has been used for all of my USB testing. To test the maximum performance of the card reader I used what is the fastest card we’ve ever tested a 64GB UHS-II produced by lexar. What I see is unsurprising but not what I had hoped for, the reader is certainly quick offering impressive speeds for it’s size but is limited to a UHS-I bus as opposed to UHs-II which allowed the card used to post a record setting 242MB/s sequential read.
Overall the C1 is a good reader, honestly my only complaint is that it’s UHS-I instead of UHS-II which considering it’s price(12.99 at the time of writing) isn’t a deal breaker although I wish it had been on the package and lexar’s webpage hopefully they update one or both to address this shortcoming. It was easy to use on both android and a PC and supports OSX as well making it compatible with most new systems and smartphones. The C1 is an excellent device for grabbing a video from a gopro, drone or any other microSD equipped device to share, edit or backup wherever you are.
