No contest. USB 3 is much faster than FW400.
Because it's expensive. $49.99
Cool. It almost makes me wish I had a use for one :-D
There are Macs that have Thunderbolt ports, but not built-in USB 3.0 ones. Maybe their users would be potential customers for Thunderbolt-based card readers.
I don't care as much about expense as size, the readers you listed seemed like they would perform well but they sure look a lot more massive than the Lexar reader.
Wow. I stand corrected! Although I can also be pedantic and say technically my post's still correct because it isn't out yet (the web page says "Coming Soon"). And when it does, who knows how much it will cost. Chances are it will, like FireWire, cost many times as much as the $12.16 USB 3 reader at Monoprice.
FYI, the USB 3 version is supposed to cost $100 and the TB version $200 (it's a four-bay card reader). And one can argue that a dual-port TB device includes something akin to a two-port (TB) hub.
The fastest cards today offer about 170 MB/s or 1.35 GBit/s. USB 3 offers 5 GBit/s, TB 1 offers 10 GBit/s, TB 2 20 GBit/s. So a four-bay reader might just about saturate USB 3 but you'd need four of the fastest cards and a PCI SSD or a RAID on the receiving end to notice any difference. I'd mainly get TB to reduce the number of cables.
You can gat that reader from B&H for $27.
I've also got the Transcend and it's fine. I haven't clocked it, but my MBP has USB3 ports and the Transcend unit is visibly faster than my Lexar FW400 reader. Bonus: it reads most kinds of removable media, so it's very nice to have for a number of reasons.
That's what I thought. Still, a lot of high volume photographers could see value in a four-bay reader when used with software that can ingest efficiently (in parallel) from it, even if the bus isn't fully saturated. The four bays might just make it worth their time to pay 16x the price of the Monoprice reader.
Why do you say..... 'no built-in USB3 ports' ???
Before making such bold statements better check your facts firsts (if your memory cannot be relied upon). TB was introduced by Apple in 2011, USB 3 was added in 2012 (to laptops, minis, and iMacs). And if you want to count the TB display, it was introduced in 2011 as well but kept its USB 2 ports throughout 2012 and 2013.
The MacBook that I have, was bought in October 2013...if I've got my thoughts right on THIS one...the model was first introduced in I'm sure February 2013. That's "some time earlier" enough to be what I had in mind... and YOUR statement was made in July 2014.. reading just as though it referred to such as models almost 18 months ago or more.
