Perhaps the M.2 HAT+ and a decent SSD?

USB3 could plausibly be faster than the SD card as the spec allows for 5Gbps+ but I don't know about Pis that much, I'd defer to someone with experience.

As a photographer I can tell you that SD cards, even high class ones have laughably awful speeds - any proper camera that needs to do video will use CFexpress Type B cards which are tremendously faster.