7D in the wild and a cautionary tale

[Keith Moreau]

Originally Posted by Michael Nistler

Otherwise, as Keith pointed out if your laptop you really want faster CF upload transfers than USB. SanDisk makes an CF Express card that's really fast and their firewire-based CF reader is nice although its a passive device and requires computer power (not available on a 4 pin firewire nor my 6 pin Express firewire board it seems).

Michael inspired me to actually get one of those Sandisk Firewire CF card readers I spoke about. Wow. It's a FW800 (comes with FW800-FW800 and FW800-FW400 cable). I used the FW800 connection to my Mac Pro.

Did a few tests comparing to a not-shabby Sandisk USB 2.0 Reader, here are the results using a simple Mac OS utility, the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test Utility:

Sandisk USB CF Card Reader - Kingston Elite Pro 32GB: Read: 9.5 MB/s, Write: 7.0 MB/s
Sandisk USB CF Card Reader - Sandisk Extreme III UDMA: Read: 10.2 MB/s, Write: 9.3MB/s
Sandisk USB FW Card Reader - Kingston Elite Pro 32GB: Read: 51.7 MB/s, Write: 9.5 MB/s
Sandisk USB FW Card Reader - Sandisk Extreme III UDMA: Read: 29.1 MB/s, Write: 25.8MB/s

So the Firewire CF reader is up to 5 times faster reading, 2.5 times writing (though you wouldn't use the writing functionality that much). It's also interesting that the Kingston Elite Pro is almost twice as fast being read than the Sandisk Extreme, but also 1/3 the speed writing (where it could be important... but not for video, in my experience.)

I also ordered a Delkin SD to CF adapter to see if it will also speed up my SDHC card transfers from my Sony EX1 SDHC cards.