Dowloading images from the camera

I am wondering if people can offer suggestions on the fastest way to download images from my camera/CF ?

I am using a D2X and a 4GB RIDATA 80X PRO II Compact Flash GOLD EDITION

The CF card specs are;

Data transfer rate to/from host: 16.6MB/second burst

Sustained write: True 6MB/second

Sustained read: 9.62MB/second maximum

Would a Firewire CF card reader be quicker than USB 2.0 camera connection (or USB 2.0 card reader)?

... or is the CF card the limiting factor?

cheers

Lndr

Firewire and USB2.0 have fairly similar speeds (400Mbps vs. 480Mbps). The CF card will be the limiting factor.

I have a 32 bit Card Bus reader which my CF card goes into and which go together into the PCMCIA slot of my laptop PC. This way a full download of a 4 GB card takes only about 5 minutes. Before I was using a normal PCMCIA adapter and the download took around 50 minutes!

You definately want to use a card reader of some sort. Conecting the camera to the computer takes FOREVER.

Although there is supposed to be little difference between Firewire and usb2 in terms of speed, I still find Firewire to be faster. I use Lexar Firewire CF card readers which are pretty quick. Certainly the download speed appears to be card speed dependant.

I a USB II card reader and can upload my pics to my computer in about 5 mins when the card is full and that's 4GB.

a full download of a 4 GB card takes only about 5 minutes

i wish!

hmmm ... this makes me think it could be a hardware issue ... <_<

Although there is supposed to be little difference between Firewire and usb2 in terms of speed, I still find Firewire to be faster. I use Lexar Firewire CF card readers which are pretty quick. Certainly the download speed appears to be card speed dependant.

... what sort download time per gig do you get from the lexar firewire CF reader?

OK ... I "updated" the windows windows drivers for the USB Root Hub ... that has improved the speed

now it takes 6 min 8 sec to download 2.00 GB. Now by my (bad) math that is 5.4 MB/sec. This seems significantly less than the 9.6 MB read speed specified for the card ...

now it takes 6 min 8 sec to download 2.00 GB.  Now by my (bad) math that is 5.4 MB/sec.  This seems significantly less than the 9.6 MB read speed specified for the card  ...

Where are you downloading to? Your harddisk may be slow or fragmented which could make a download very slow. 6 minutes for 2 GB sounds pretty 'slow' to me. If i remember right i do about 3-4 minutes for 4GB.

USB2 and firewire are about the same speed, but there is also firewire800 which is supposed to be twice as fast as normal firewire.

Cor

Downloading CF card to a portable HD with built in CF reader such as the Nexto or something similar is by far the quickest as it bypass the bottleneck from the CPU. I am not sure how it works exactly but in comparison to using USB2 CF card reader with my laptop, it is actually faster to download the card to the Nexto unit then backup the Nexto unit via USB2 to my laptop. Go figure!

Where are you downloading to?

A desktop - AMD 64 3500+, ASUS A8N-SLI motherboard, 1GB RAM

Your harddisk may be slow or fragmented which could make a download very slow.

My images are going to their own 235GB partition on a WD 300GB 7200 rpm 8MB cache SATA HDD

Analysis showed 76% free space and 0% free space fragmentation ... so that shouldn't be the bottleneck???

If i remember right i do about 3-4 minutes for 4GB.

that's what Id like to see!

Another thing that typically slows down read/write times is if your card reader is connected to a USB hub, and even more so if that hub does not have external power. This may not be your case, but connecting directly to the PC instead of going through the hub should improve download speeds a fair bit.

Another thing that typically slows down read/write times is if your card reader is connected to a USB hub, and even more so if that hub does not have external power. 

Thanks. In this case its a powered, internal cardreader which is plugged directly into the motherboard USB pins.

A firewire reader will probably be faster, but...

USB 2.0 and Firewire 400 have similar raw bandwidth (400 Mbps for FW and 480 Mbps for USB 2.0), but Firewire has a much lower overhead/package of data transmitted, so even though USB 2.0 can theoretically go faster, the "here comes another packet, did you get it, are you sure?" type communications between the reader and the computer reduce the total capacity that can be transferred in any time by USB 2.0. ASSUMING that you are doing a single large transfer (such as uploading all of a card in one go), firewire should be faster.

There is an extensive investigation of CF-computer speeds over a firewire reader on the Rob Galbraith site here, they indicate that they could get about 10.8 MB (note megaBytes/second, the 400/480 for firewire and USB 2.0 are megabits/second, 8 bits to a byte ) from a 2GB version of the Ritek/Riadata 80X media.

I have both a USB 2.0 reader and a firewire 400 card reader. Using a Mac the firewire 400 reads the card significantly faster. Using a Lexar 4 GB card.

... at least I know it should go faster ... thanks for the ideas guys ... please keep 'em coming!!

meanwhile I'm trying to find someone in Australia with the Lexar firewire reader

cheers

Lndr

City Software:

http://www.citysoftware.com.au/Browse/a4b4...ItemDetail.aspx

Techbuy:

http://www.techbuy.com.au/products/47853/M...lash_Reader.asp

thanx Gudge Nobody had any stock was the problem <_<

I ended up getting the (aledgedly) last RW024 the ditributor had through my local hardly normal. Embarassing to buy tech there ... but they were the only people prepared to order it in ... even though I'd already spoken to the distributor

Here's hoping I can get closer to that 10 MB/s

I was told that firewire card reader will be a lot faster on a Mac however if you use Window, the way firewire is implemented is somewhat crippled so on PC the difference is minute.