GTT Reviews: BaseQi UHSII-420A Macbook Pro Hidden MicroSD Card Reader

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gear. Today I'm talking into my Ody Maxwell headphones using the headset mic feeding into my MacBook Pro using the Odyssey's USB dongle. There you go for all you geeks that want to know. All right, what are we doing today? Well, I thought I would show you some new slick tech for your MacBook. Okay, so I just got this

MacBook Pro M1 16in edition on eBay. It's incredibly powerful, capable, amazing screen, and a hell of a good value at like 800 bucks. So, I wanted to spruce it up just a little bit. So, what I chose to do was to actually get myself this very unique memory card reader that fits into the side of the MacBook flush. It's going to go right into this memory card slot right here. What makes that special? There's a million card readers that fit those slots to be able to read

a micro SD card, right? Well, this one company makes one that's custom made to fit specifically in that opening with a flush finish that looks exactly like the finish of the Mac. That may sound like no big deal, but it has to be engineered specifically because Apple changes the depth of that opening or that port at their own whim whenever whatever it suits to them. So, here's what I

found made by Bass Chi. It's called the aluminum micro SD card adapter for MacBook Pro 14in 16in. It's an adapter only and that is the model UHS2-420A for MacBook Pro 14 or 16 inch specifically the new MacBook Pros. It may work with the older Intel MacBook Pros, but this is really intended for the newer series M1 and M1 through M4.

Okay, so I've opened it up. You can see there's a lot of contacts on the bottom of this card, but that's going to slide right in to the SD card slot on the side of the MacBook Pro and give us theoretically the maximum possible readr speed from a micro SD card like this one. This 512 megabyte SD card with a maximum 160 megabits per second read speed. Probably about half that right speed at the time of this video was $30. It's capable of reading and writing at speeds fast enough to record a

compressed 4K video. I don't know if I'm going to use this for my readr drive when editing video. Probably I'll use the internal drive of the MacBook Pro because it's mega fast. The internal disc, the SSD is like gosh, I think it's over three gigabits per second readr. This will be used to store all the other documents on my machine that I don't need to readwrite rapidly. I'll probably put my entire Google Drive folder on this card to take it off the internal

storage. Let's unwrap these packages,

put the card in the reader, slip it in the MacBook Pro, and give it a try. Okay, there it is. The card is now inside the card reader. This card reader, by the way, actually cost more than the card. This little card reader, I think, was like 35 bucks. The card was $30. So, altogether for about $65, you have half a terabyte of storage, doubling the capacity of my 512 gigabyte internal storage, and now providing a nice place to put files that doesn't require carrying around another

drive or a hub. So, let's slip that in. Want to make sure it's all the way in. And it has a little indentation. If you don't have a fingernail, you can always put a little screwdriver to pop it out. I'll go ahead and allow the accessory to connect. The next thing we'll need to do is format. So, we'll go to dis utility. There's our new disc. It's actually already formatted in X fat. That means this disc should already be ready to read and write. I don't necessarily need to

reformat it. It will work as is. So now go ahead and open Finder and scroll down. We'll find Untitled. I could give it a name. In fact, I can do that right within Finder. I'll call this 512 gigabyte flash. All right, let's put something in there. What should we put in there? I'm going to go to my desktop. Maybe downloads just as a test. There's always lots of junk in the downloads folder. I'll grab everything in downloads. Copy. I'm going to make a folder and just call it

test. Paste it in there. How much data did I just copy by command I? That looks like I copied about half a gig of files. 520 megabytes. All right, let's see how long it takes to paste that in there. Preferring to copy items.

527 megabytes of files. It says about 35 minutes to go. Then now we're at 45 minutes. Now 46 minutes. That is not good. It basically copied and wrote files very rapidly till it hit about 120 megabytes. Then it came to a screeching halt and now it has resumed writing. It says 50 minutes and now that number is falling again about 1 minute per second. 47 minutes, 46 minutes, 45 minutes. Okay, so that's kind of what I was afraid of. The right speed on these

cards is mediocre or very poor. I'd say it's all relative, but certainly compared to a USBC 3.1 drive s external flash drive, and definitely compared to the internal drive, the rewrite speed of these cards is quite quite slow. When this is done copying over, which I may not even wait for, I'll run a disc read speed test with the Blackmagic speedrite tester and see how it does. Well, look at

that. All of a sudden, it picked up a huge head of steam and before it could even wrap the video, it finished copying. It seemed in the end, it actually took less than a minute to copy that half a gig of files. All right, let's give the disc speed test a go on the new card reader I've installed. So, we'll go ahead and open here and select our target drive. There it is. Click open and start the test. You can see it surged and then it settled in. Surged up to like 800 megabits, then

settled in. Then it dropped down about half and then it dropped down to what looks to be what is the actual real world right sustained right speed. So it probably has a buffer. So it takes a big surge into a buffer and then now we get the real world megabytes per second right speed of this card and card reader combo. I don't think the card reader itself is a bottleneck. It's just connecting the pins from the micro SD card into the reader of the MacBook Pro.

I think it really all comes down to the limitations of the bandwidth of micro SD cards, which is why you're not going to see micro SD cards used in professional high bit rate camera systems, right? So, yeah, it's still doing its right speed test and it's hanging in there at just under 60 megabytes. per second. When it's finished here, it's going to tell you which codecs and video resolutions it can support at that low bit

rate. And so it's really useful to know, well, okay, what can I actually do with this card? What format can shoot to this card? What's it going to be useful for? So now it's finished with the right test. It's now going to jump to the read test. And I suspect that to be more than double that number. But again, this is why we do these tests. We're going to find out in the real world what it can

actually read at. Even though the card says it can do 160 megabytes per second, there's an asterisk next to that, meaning clearly it's a best case scenario. And that's probably just one single file being read sustained over time. So as you can see in the real world on this MacBook Pro 16inch M1 machine, we're getting 88 megabytes per second. So as you can see below, what's

this card good for? You could shoot raw video at 2K and you could shoot up to, believe it or not, 8K as long as it's using a very strong codec like the H.265 codec, which a lot of consumer cameras now probably shoot in. For real world production, these memory cards are great for anybody doing 1080p. If everything you do is 1080p, these cards can read write all day long at 1080p speeds at any codec. And it can read at very high speeds for a very compressed codec like

H.265. Okay. Well, as you can see, it's

a useful device if you want that extremely clean, less clutter, not have to drag around another drive externally. You just want a place to put extra stuff when you start running out of space like me because I'm frugal and I don't want to buy massive amounts of internal storage from Apple. I hope you find that to be a useful product and if you want to get one, I'll have the link conveniently placed down in the comments below. Thanks for listening. Choice the tech.