Not All Readers Are Created Equal

After delaying for no good reason, I recently bought a Lexar Firewire 800 reader, and it's fast. A little or a lot faster than the USB 2.0 transfer devices and workflow I've been used to for 8-9 years now.

My first digital images copied from a CF card, probably around 9 years ago, used a PCMCIA adaptor which took donkey's years to move files. For a short while I used a USB 1.1 reader, until I realized I could just shove bamboo splinters under my fingernails.

Things have come a long way. I did 3 quick tests today with a full 8GB Lexar Professional 300x UDMA CF Card. It had 7.44GB of images, 1,074 files (half each: JPG, Nikon NEF).

The target drive was a Seagate 1TB External Firewire 800, 7200RPM.

Here are the results, with 3 different CF readers:
Lexar Firewire 800 CF Reader = 4:34 (274 seconds)
Sandisk USB 2.0 CF Reader = 5:05 (305 seconds)
Dell LCD / USB 2.0 built-in CF Reader = 12:50 (770 seconds)

The Lexar Firewire 800 reader was 1.1 times faster than the Sandisk USB 2.0 reader (which really surprised me, I expected it to be closer to 2x) and 2.8 times faster than the DELL Monitor's built-in USB 2.0 reader. I'll not be using the built-in CF reader in the DELL any more, even though it can be very convenient.

And for reference: copying these same files directly between 2 Firewire 800 hard drives took 3:28 (208 seconds) -- 75% of the time to copy from the Lexar CF Reader to a hard drive over Firewire 800. So today's high end CF cards aren't doing to bad in terms of comparable transfer rate.

Sandisk also makes a Firewire 800 CF Reader and I have not tested it, I would expect it to be comparable to the speed of Lexar's reader. I think Rob Galbraith has done some comparisons on these (is there anything he's not compared?) but I've not studied them.

Now I'll be honest, 4.5 minutes still seems like a long time to wait, copying files off an 8GB card. If you have four full 8GB cards from a shoot, even with Firewire 800 that would be about 20 minutes of transfer time... waiting.

I realize this sounds impatient. I'm simply making the point that anything which has us waiting for the computer is by definition a workflow bottleneck, in this case partly caused by the growing data size of today's digital images, and partly caused by the current limitations of bandwidth constraints.

For now, I'll happily take a speed increase factor of 1.1 or 2.8.

And, contrary to my expectations Sandisk's USB 2.0 reader is only 10% slower than the Firewire 800 reader, making it still a very good option. I like to have an extra CF reader handy in my camera bag and light kit.