SD expansion card super slow?

Framework Laptop 13 Linux
1

Hello!

I just bought the new SD expansion card and it delivered in record time. (Expedited shipping really did mean expedited :0 )

But upon testing it out today, I’ve noticed that it is almost unusably slow. I’m a hobby photographer and where moving 3GB of pics using my old dongle setup would’ve taken a few seconds, it’s taking a few minutes.

I’ve narrowed it down to an issue of read speeds: viewing or transferring an unloaded photos directly from the SD card requires a long wait. But once it’s viewable, the transfer speed is what I’d expect.

I’m planning on running some actual bench marks soon. Please do recommend any cli benchmarks I can run so I can compare speeds via by dongle and the expansion card!

Has anyone else experienced this? Any insights y’all got?

Also! I’m using the Framework Laptop 13 AMD Ryzen 7040Series and running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

2

Benchmarks using hdparm -tT:
Dongle:

Timing cached reads: 22862 MB in 1.99 seconds = 11479.34 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 72 MB in 3.02 seconds = 23.85 MB/sec

Expansion Card:

Timing cached reads: 24120 MB in 1.99 seconds = 12115.11 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: read(2097152) returned 143360 bytes

I’m not sure why different results were returned for “Timing buffered disk reads”.
Seems like the differences reflect the exact behavior that I was experiencing. Photos would be unreliably read, with some entirely unreadable. But those that were able to be read would be cached and then perform as expected.

Could just be a fault with my expansion card ://

3

Is it super hot to the touch?