Conclusion
Lexar XQD 2.0 64GB card is for sure designed for professional users so it won’t be popular product. There are still not many manufacturers who are offering cards in this new standard and Lexar cards is the best what you can get if you are thinking to use one of the cameras which are supporting XQD cards.
If we compare our benchmark results to declared bandwidth then we can see that we could expect some more. Maximum bandwidth achieved on our test platforms was 255MB/s. Still good but we wish to see 400MB/s+. As I already mentioned, regardless how you see that, Lexar cards are the best you can get if you want to use camera with XQD support. I assume that performance in dedicated cameras is higher than the one in USB 3.0 card reader. I will try to verify our results and will let you know if we will be able to improve them.
Now maybe couple of words about availability and prices. I could find Lexar XQD cards in many online stores so there is no problem with availability. Harder will be with USB 3.0 card reader as it’s new product and so far I haven’t seen it in popular stores. XQD 2.0 64GB card costs about $100 so it’s not cheap but also not so expensive comparing to other professional cards. I can only give as example CFast cards which can cost $300 for similar capacity.
Lexar XQD 2.0 cards are covered by lifetime warranty while USB 3.0 card reader by five year limited warranty. Hard to say what is better as I doubt that anyone will use it for more than five years looking at the average time in which we replace our hardware. Still it’s a good sign that Lexar is sure about its products quality.
Pros:
- High performance ( even though lower than expected )
- Reasonable price
- High quality
- Lifetime warranty on XQD card and five year warranty on XQD card reader
Cons:
- Performance lower than expected
- USB reader is quite large and can be problem to use it in some devices
Final words:
Even though we had some issues to achieve full performance on our test platform, I can still recommend Lexar XQD 2.0 card and XQD USB 3.0 reader. It delivers high performance and top quality for all who need it the most.
Lexar Professional XQD 2.0 products are simply the best you can get if you work on designed for this standard cameras.
