I'm not sure why a firewire flash reader is faster. I want to believe though! Can somebody explain this to me before I spend another $78 dollars on something I don't need?

Isn't it all ultimately limited by the speed of the CF card? My CF cards read/write at 90 MB/s. Sure firewire 800 gives you 800 MB/second and a high speed USB gives you up to 480 MB/second but who needs that bandwidth when you can write/read at only 90 MB/s.

This has all recently been reenforced to me in experience. When I download a full 32 Mb card using a USB stick, it is taking about 12 minutes. Then I was on a shoot with somebody who had a firewire reader and full cards still took about 12 minutes. This wasn't a scientific experiment, perhaps one card wasn't entirely full or and we were downloading on different macs to different hard drives, etc, maybe there was a problem with his macbook's bus compared to my imac's bus -- who knows? Am I completely confused about all this?

Now if there was a firewire reader that could read all three cards at the same time....count me in!

Beyond that...thank you all who posted in this and similar threads about the Canon CF300/305...I recently bought one based, in part, upon the endorsements here and I used it this week to shoot at a convention event. It was extremely fun to use, the focus and lens in particular was easy to handle. The auto focus was fantastic except in low light. Thanks!

Eric.

I can't tell you WHY Firewire is faster, all I can say is that there is no doubt it is faster.
One of the things I cover in my 3.5 hour XF305/300 training DVD that I just finished this week is speed comparisons of various ingest methods and workflows. The Firwire reader I recommend is 2.6x faster than the camera and 1.8x faster than the fastest USB drive that I tested. Isn't that worth $75? I sure think it is!
In fact, the Firewire reader is 7.6x faster than real time even with 50Mpbs footage.

Agree with you Doug. FireWire 400 is faster than USB2, FW800 is super fast. I do not have card (or XF camera) to hand, but a full 32Gb card is around a 15min download from memory?

Nick.

I can ingest a 16GB Hoodman card in just a little over 5 minutes.

speed improvement explained
 

I know this is a few months old, but wanted to make explain that firewire and USB are specified in Mbs, that is bits per seconds. And the 90MBs of the card is in bytes per second. Normaly the lower case letter b stands for bits, the uppercase letter B stands for bytes.

So 800Mbs (bits) is about 80MByte/s and 480Mbs for the USB is about 48 MByte/s. Which clearly explains why the firewire card reader can read the 90MB/s card faster. Please note that I use a factor 10, as often two extra bits are used for error checking.