Thinkpads Forum

Hi,

New here I've had a W530 for 3+ years now, and only really started to care about the SD card reader since I got my D5200 Nikon DSLR, and I've noticed that all of my newer good UHS I cards only seem to run at class 10 speeds (<=20MBps). I just picked up a couple new Pny SDXC 64GB UHSI (3) cards that are rated at 95MBps, and the W530 can't get anywhere near that. It's actually much faster to transfer stuff off my camera using it's USB cable, than to swap the SD card into my laptop. A bit of a pain.

TL;DR: What speeds do the W530's SD reader support, and if it is supposed to support UHS-I, how can I make mine actually work at that speed?

Which speeds are you getting on your fastest cards?

If it's under 25MB/s, then it's probably not running in UHS-1 mode. If it's anything over that, then it probably is.

My experience with the card readers in T420/X220 was that they are capable of UHS-1, but they are not very fast writers, although read speeds are fine. See here.

I would assume the same capabilities in the W520/W530, but I am not 100% sure, as it seems they use slightly different Ricoh chips for the media card readers. The information on the exact chip used is also somewhat vague/contradictory.

There is a way I found which seems to be a good indication of whether UHS-1 is functional or not. See here.

I'm getting like 19MBps max. It sucks.

I was pretty sure it wasn't initializing UHS mode since it was under "normal" Class 10 speeds.

For the most part i care about read speeds, since its to read photos off of! Tons of photos. I took like 2000+ photos on my last trip. Getting those all transferred off via the built in reader is annoying at best, and painful at worst. Especially since I let it save both jpg and raw versions, so it double's the file count to read. It detects the card under linux as a new "high speed SDXC card", but gives no other information.

Thanks for the tip, I'll take a look at that post, and the RWE program after work

Perhaps you are using Windows' generic card reader driver? I believe you should install Ricoh's driver from Lenovo's site to get UHS-1 enabled.

I never found a way to get real speed from the SDXC slot, but did find that putting the SD cards in a cheap USB<-SD card adapter, and plugging them into the USB3 port, would let me access the SD cards much faster than the native port for them.

Go figure.

I suspect, like the normal USB ports, that the SD card slot is simply on a slow hub and there's nothing to be done about it.