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Any quicker card readers, computers?

How do people download images from cards? I'm finding that with two of us shooting on a trip maybe each with a couple or more 2MB CD cards to download to a laptop with a USB2 card reader it is just taking too long. Then back up from the laptop onto 2 different USB portable drives and its nearly an all night affair each night.

Do some of the laptops have external fast SATA connectors for portable external HD? At the end of two weeks, some days with few pictures taken, had about 50GB of raw files.
 

Ray West

New member
Hi Charles,

The hyperdrive is a pretty quick backup method - 1Gb per minute, or so. A couple of units, and your pc with two usb ports could be a quick way. e.g. back up to hyperdrived in the field, then duplicate the drive images via the laptop back at base. Not too sure about your memory cards being ok with hyperdrive.

Best wishes,

Ray
 

JohanElzenga

New member
It sounds as if you are using a USB 1.1 port. Downloading a 2 GB CF card over a USB 2.0 port shouldn't take more than about 10 minutes or so. Making a backup should be even faster.
 

Mike Funnell

New member
Whether USB 2.0 or not (and believe, it makes a difference) I find that a battery powered drive that accepts cards is a real advantage. During, or if not before, at the end of the day, I put full cards in the drive and go off to do other things. When it comes time to do something with the image, its already there at HDD speeds. (I do back up from there, and don't delete until the file is in at least two places other than the card.)

The drive I use is a thing called a "Wolverine". It works fine, but its nothing special and I'm sure there are many others.

...Mike
 

Brian Hamfeldt

New member
Charles,

Have you looked into downloading with FireWire readers? I know... on paper, USB2 is rated faster than FW, but in reality, FW is generally faster (up to 50%). The best part about FW, is that if you use multiple readers, then FW maintains the throughput, whereas USB is 'hubbed' and splits the bandwidth among all connected devices (unless you have one controller per device)

If you had a 32-bit Cardbus adapter with multiple ports on it, you could download multiple cards simultaneously, and then plug in the pair of external drives and dump the image out simultaneously. The bottleneck would then become the hard drive of the laptop.

Personally, I do event photography and only shoot JPG, but I download about 100Gb per day via multiple FW readers. My servers each have RAID10 with hot spare that mirror each other across Gbit. So, when I download about 1Gb across 3 cards, I have my pix in two highly redundant locations in about 90 seconds - 2 minutes. I have a backup of my backup downloader that is USB2 with multiple cards, but overall, the USB doesn't keep up with the two FW downloaders.

Brian.
 
Thanks for the suggestions. My reader and external drives are USB 2 or at least that's what the computer identifies them as. Usually start a card downloading, do something else so am not sure of actual timing but have to be near to then put in the next, then next. So maybe looking at one of the battery drives would help as would FireWire from the sounds of it. After cards are downloaded then back up onto external USB 2 drive which takes maybe an hour. Go to bed and start the 2nd backup. Maybe one problem is that its often midnight before getting started in the first place :).
 

Asher Kelman

OPF Owner/Editor-in-Chief
Brian Hamfeldt said:
Charles,

Personally, I do event photography and only shoot JPG, but I download about 100Gb per day via multiple FW readers. My servers each have RAID10 with hot spare that mirror each other across Gbit. So, when I download about 1Gb across 3 cards, I have my pix in two highly redundant locations in about 90 seconds - 2 minutes. I have a backup of my backup downloader that is USB2 with multiple cards, but overall, the USB doesn't keep up with the two FW downloaders.

Brian.

Could you explain 1GB across 3 cards? Is that real?

Asher
 

Brian Hamfeldt

New member
Asher,

When I do events, I have three (usually) FW card readers connected in series - one per shooter. Each shooter gets 80-150 images in two minutes, then I download all cards simultaneously to one common folder.

So what I am getting is about 300-400 images downloaded from three separate cards - on separate readers. This is a real advantage of Firewire over USB - there is enough bandwith that all cards download at full speed - where as USB wired in the same fashion would be 1/3 as fast on each card.

Brian.
 

Brian Hamfeldt

New member
Sid,
I use the Lexar RW019 model - 'lil black ones with 6-pin plug and no eject button.

I tried the newest Lexar Pro models very early on (I think I was one of the first shipments) and they performed miserably, but I've heard others having luck with them lately.

Brian.
 

Alan T. Price

New member
it seems to me that you have a problem with your laptop. It can't be that slow if it's healthy. You may need to get into the device manager and check that the hard drive(s) are using 32-bit Ultra DMA transfer mode, and that the IDE controller is a bus master controller.

There is a possibility that you have old and slow CF cards but that would not explain the slow transfer between the laptop HD and the external HDs. You should be getting 10-20 MB per second without any difficulty at all.

See if there are updated drivers for your external HDs and for your card reader. And for your laptop.

Avoid backing up what you have already backed up. You don't want to copy 50GB to each of two drives each night if you can copy just the new files. Make use of the archive bit in windows explorer.
 
It's not a very fast laptop to start with and its internal drive is slow but will check out what the device manager says about it but the BIOS doesn't offer much. I know, need to get a better laptop, this one was simply cheap. I only add to the files already backed up not the whole lot each evening.

It also seems that an eSATA specification exists and longer term this might be a way to go. Don't yet know much about it.
 

nicolas claris

OPF Co-founder/Administrator
Obviously speed also depends of card speed:
Powerbook G4
2 years old Lexar (black) Firewire 400 reader:
4 Gb Microdrives (full) = 9 minutes
8 Gb Sandisk (full) = 8 minutes (hey! that's more than twice the speed than with the Microdrive!)

Hope it helps
 

John_Nevill

New member
If you are a laptop user (PC or Mac) with an express card slot then it may be worth waiting for the new Delkin Expresscard 34. It boasts a transfer rate of 20Mb/sec and will retail at ~$60. Its due out this month and my money will be on one.

Edited: If I can get one, as there's no outlets in europe yet.
 
Last edited:

Sid Jervis

pro member
Real world experience after buying the Sandisk FW unit.
£59.00 Sandisk Firewire Extreme Card reader + Kingston 1Gb 100x CF card 892Mb of data.

Transfer via FW400 to Mac G4 laptop using finder = 8 seconds.
Transfer via FW800 to Mac G4 laptop using finder = 7 seconds.
Maybe a faster card (or laptop) would use the FW800 better.

Nice and quick for me though.
I will see what other cards achieve when I get some time.
 

Dierk Haasis

pro member
BTW, very often internal interfaces, i.e. the PCMCIA slot or built-in card readers, are not as fast as external ones. Counterintuitive but true.
 
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