soapbox

I just got a firewire reader for the cards from my camera, so I figured it was worth comparing the old and new readers:

Old reader: a Sony 12-in-one job connected via usb (480 mb/s)
copy a 1.52 GB file from the iMac’s hard disk to the card: 3m16.714s
copy it back to the hard drive: 2m27.950s
write speed: 7.9 MB/s
read speed: 10.5 MB/s

New reader: Sandisk Extreme Firewire (can do Firewire 800, but I’m using it with 400)
copy the 1.52 GB file to the card: 52.183s
copy it back: 45.834s
write speed: 29.3 MB/s
read speed: 34.0 MB/s

I’ve literally been doing this experiment as I write the post and I started out by hoping that the firewire reader actually was faster and I hadn’t wasted the money. It definitely is since a factor of three is nothing to sneeze at. I think I’m actually running into a limit of how fast a 7200 rpm hard drive can transfer data at this point.

I guess my next purchase should be one of the Western Digital Velociraptor 10K rpm drives.