The SD Association, a non-profit organization that sets memory card standards, last week announced SD card 7.0, another major iteration of the ubiquitous standard for non-volatile memory cards, promising data transfer speeds of nearly one gigabyte per second.
CalDigit today unveiled a new version of its well-received Thunderbolt 3 docking station. We put it through its paces, and it's better in almost every way.
LaCie, the premium brand of Seagate, makes some fantastic products. I've used their Rugged Drive (the same one you can say many an Apple Store employee toting around) for years. Recently, I've been using their updated 2Big Thunderbolt 3 Dock that not only offers plenty of storage, but a multitude of ports and expansion options as well.
Usually we see Thunderbolt 3 devices belong to one of two categories. The first being storage, the second being docking station. There are very few that fall in the middle of that Venn diagram. The CalDigit AV Pro II belongs there, as well as LaCie's 2Big Thunderbolt 3 Dock.
As per usual, to get the best look at this desktop beast, check out my in-depth video.
Every time you connect an external peripheral to your Mac, such as an SD card, an external hard drive, or a USB flash drive to transfer files, you should safely eject it when you're finished using it. In this post, we'll talk a little bit about why it's important to follow this process, and we'll also show you various ways of doing it.
Apple released an update for the Apple Music app on the Android platform via the Google Play Store on Wednesday with a much-needed new feature: the ability to save songs from the app to your Android device's removable SD card storage.
Of all the products that I've reviewed as of late, this is one of the ones I've been most excited for. Since getting the iPad Pro and trying to establish a video editing workflow with the extra large tablet, I've run into a few bottlenecks. The most obvious bottleneck has to do with transferring video from an SD Card to the iPad Pro's flash storage.
All of the dongles that I had available were of the USB 2.0 variety, so transfer speeds were horrendously slow when trying to get 4K video files from my Panasonic GH4 to my iPad Pro.
Fortunately, the iPad Pro does support USB 3.0, which results in a much faster file transfer experience—it was just a matter of Apple releasing an accessory that supported the extra throughput. The first accessory to do so is Apple's just-launched update to its Lightning to SD Card  Reader. The dongle looks very much like the previous version of the reader that debuted in 2012, but the Late 2015 update has USB 3.0 support in tow.
How is the experience when transferring large files to the iPad Pro with this new reader? Should those of you invested in a video or photo workflow consider dropping the $29.00 asking price for the updated version?
If you're looking to quickly transfer photos and videos from your camera's SD Card to the iPad Pro, then look no further than Apple's own Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader ($29.00) to handle the job. Apple explicitly states on its store page that the peripheral supports USB 3.0 transfer speeds on the iPad Pro.
Interestingly, the same cannot be said for Apple's Lightning to USB Camera Adapter, as that still only supports USB 2.0 transfer speeds. The Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader, which just launched and is available to ship in 3-5 business days from Apple's online store, appears to be the only accessory to support USB 3.0 transfer speeds on the iPad Pro at this time.
According to CNET's iPad Pro review, Apple's just-released tablet is capable of supporting USB 3.0 transfer speeds via its Lightning connector. The report, which corroborates a finding by iFixit, and was later brought to our attention by MacRumors' Juli Clover, is notable for a few reasons.
First, it would make the iPad Pro the first and only device that Apple makes (that's not a Mac) to support USB 3.0 transfer speeds. Secondly, it means that copying large 4K video files to the device will be much more feasible.