download speeds
 

Just finished a shoot. 33 mins of 100mps on a 32GB Kingston card. Plugged into an Mac Pro the download time was detailed as 60 mins. I thought and have download data before working on roughly 2/3 real time to complete. Any one know of a reason why it would take almost 2x real time to dowload?

Dear Chris,

This is dependent on your computer setup.

Which Card Reader are you using?

Are your disk drives SATA or eSATA?

Are you transferring to a USB disk drive?

Are you transferring to a Firewire drive? Is is a Firewire 400 drive?

Is the Card Reader a Firewire 400 unit on the same Fireware as a Firewire drive?


If you use a good FireWire 800/400 Card Reader or an ExpressCard 34 Card Reader, and transfer to an internal SATA-II hard drive your transfer can be fast.

If you use a USB Card Reader, then transfer to a USB disk drive, or a Firewire 400 Card Reader, it can be slow.

Chris,

I'm not a Mac user yet, but many (most) of my clients are. Generally, the downloads have been pretty fast for them. I shot over 50 minutes of 50 Mbps HD (Long GOP) for a client last week and it downloaded from my Extreme III SanDisk card in 15 minutes. The following day, using the same setup, a download of much less time said it was going to take an hour. The download did, in fact, start very slowly. After canceling the download and re-trying a couple of times, I suggested he re-start the system. Since I'm a Windows user, I'm familiar with that process :-).

That worked like a charm... go figure.

Using the CF reader supplied with the Nanoflash - I am getting fairly consistent download times of 1 GB/ minute - using ShotPut Pro and downloading to 3 hard drive systems (all Raid 0) simultaneously. Ony PC here - no MAC's

I too get about 1Gb/min with the supplied CF card reader, which I have found to be surprisingly fast for a USB device. I'm using Mac's.