Sabrent V60-II SD cards reviewed: Reasonable speeds with mass appeal

Sabrent has released a new budget-friendly range of SD cards. Chris Foreman puts them through their paces.

Not resting on its laurels Sabrent has recently introduced a range of new V60 UHS II SD cards at a more budget friendly end of the market. Whilst they are not as headline grabbing as its top end V90 UHS-III cards, these are workhorse units with prices to match. The suite of cards comprise of a 128GB capacity at £47, 256GB at £83 and 512GB at £150. 

It's also worth adding that Sabrent has recently launched a 1TB version of this card ($269), although this was not available in time for this test.

What about the speeds?

I took the 512GB card for testing in combination with a few different card reader options, which included Sabrent's new SD/microSD card reader.

With manufacturer stated read speeds of up to 270MB/s I used Blackmagic’s Disk speed test tool to test these claims. Initial tests were on a Mac studio using the internal card reader and here I managed to achieve average read speeds of 230MB/s and write speeds of 133MB/s with a file size of 1GB, although occasionally the read speeds dropped to around 180 MB/s.

Swapping things around and using my external Thunderbolt 3 HyperDrive dock still attached to the the Mac Studio, the card showed read speeds of 210MB/s per second and write speeds of 130MB/s.

In summary this card gave a solid performance, if nothing stellar considering the original specifications. It should be stated that it's always almost impossible to reach manufacturers stated speeds due to the ‘lab conditions’ and the variation in the hardware used to test and validate the capabilities.

No slow down

Using Sabrent’s new USB-3 dual slot card reader, speeds were by and large the same; I got read speeds of 230MB/s and write speeds of 130MB/s. The card reader worked well in this scenario, certainly achieving almost exactly the same speeds as the built in reader in the Mac Studio. The only slight concern here is that the cable is captive so can’t be swapped out if damaged and its 18cm length may not suit all users.          

Given the fact that in these tests the host machine remained unchanged, the lower end write speed of 130-133MB/s seems to be a hard limit which is not hardware dependent. However, the read speed does tend to fluctuate between 210-230MB/s depending on the card reader in use.