Compact Flash readers ?

[Shadytree]

Are USB2 readers still the fastest solution out there?
Had a card with 600 shots on the other week, that took over 30minutes to upload to my computer. Is that about right or slow ?

p.s. using Sandisk Extreme III cards

[crmcatee]

I use SanDisks Extreme USB 2.0 reader. Excellent it is and I've never waited ten minutes for 200 photos to be downloaded so waiting 30 minutes for 600 seems excessive..

[Shadytree]

Should have mentioned that was at 10mpxl per pic, makes a diff

[marctwo]

Looks like you can get a Firewire800 one which should be faster if you have a fast enough card to notice the difference.

http://www.jessops.com/Store/s35936/0/Card-Readers...

[GetCarter]

er... does your camera not connect to your computer?

[Typhon]

I have an ~ £8 one from PC World for USB2 connection. Does the job.

[horacethefrog]

Another vote for the Sandisk Extreme reader. Tried several other readers, including a couple built into a 3.5inch bay on the PC and had numerous problems, card not recognised, slow transfer etc. No problems at all with the Sandisk reader and only £14.99 from http://www.mymemory.co.uk/memory/SanDisk/Extreme/2.0/USB/Reader 

[JohnS]

I got one of those 8 in one readers for £5.99 from my local Shell petrol station. It's USB 2.0, and reads photos much quicker than directly connecting the camera to the PC.

OK, build quality isn't fantastic, but for the price I can hardly complain

A full 1Gb card seems to take less than 2 minutes to transfer all the files onto the PC.

[Shadytree]

GetCarter said:

er... does your camera not connect to your computer?

er yes, amazingly never tried downloadig that way. So by your tone Steve, I guess it's the quickest?

[GetCarter]

Much quicker! (Well it is with mine - not sure about other makes/versions). Plus you don't have to faff about taking the card out every time.

Edit to add: This is compared to a regular SanDisk card reader... never tried the extreme one.

Edited by GetCarter on Thursday 2nd August 07:35

[MonkeyHanger]

Just did a quick test.

Dumped a full 4Gb Extreme 3 via the built-in reader on my PC in a shade over 7 minutes (400+ Shots). 30 minutes seems very excessive for 600 shots even at 10Mp.

Even my old external USB2 reader was pretty fast, certainly faster than a direct connection to the camera was.

[size13]

Shadytree said:

GetCarter said:

er... does your camera not connect to your computer?

er yes, amazingly never tried downloadig that way. So by your tone Steve, I guess it's the quickest?

Some camera are still USB1 so will be slower that a USB2 card reader.
I've got 4 card readers and the fastest I've found is a trust one from Tesco.

I've also got a pcmcia slot cf reader and it's pig slow!

[TonyHetherington]

Ahhh interesting thread! Especially the camera you're using, Shady, that may well be very quick indeed!

I have just a multi-format reader thing that I got for a tenner from local computer shop. How can you tell if it's USB2.0, though? As sometimes a full 2gb card can seem to take it's time (10mins)...?

If I get that SANDisk one above, but don't use sandisk extreme cards, will I still see an increase in speed?

Thanks people

[miniman]

GetCarter said:

Much quicker! (Well it is with mine - not sure about other makes/versions). Plus you don't have to faff about taking the card out every time.

Edit to add: This is compared to a regular SanDisk card reader... never tried the extreme one.

Guess it depends on the camera - I've always found a card reader to be much faster than plugging the camera in directly (350D).

[Rude Girl]

Shady

Pod replaced the a:\ drive on my desktop with a combined floppy and card reader (it's the same size). Cost about £20 I think, is much faster than downloading from the camera and a lot tidier than an external reader - better than having cables all over. Give him a ring.

[stuthemong]

If its normally a lot faster, chances are it's your PC slowing things down.

Id have a check you had a lot off free hard drive space, if not, a disk defragment may well help improve things. If your disk is heavily fragmented, then writing 4 gigs of info could take an awful lot of time indeed

Stu

[MikeyC]

here is a pretty good cross-reference review of cf cards & readers:

http://www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?ci...

click on the compact flash picture & away you go.

The sandisk extreme III is limited to about 16Mb/s whereas the IV version can get up to about 26Mb/s

HTH

[imperialism2024]

Hmm, it usually takes about 15 minutes to download a 1gb Lexar Professional (80x) card to my computer... Maybe it's because I'm putting them directly to my external hdd? Even so, it's a USB 2.0 drive, and the card reader is a SanDisk PC Card unit.