Sonnet QIO p2 card reader, Feb 5?

[Sneakle]

Feb 5 was the date announced for this unit to arrive on the scene. If anyone gets their hands on one, please share your thoughts. I see it available at B&H for $900, with a note that it's not a regularly stocked item so may take a week or two to ship.

[hotchkiss]

Was that Feb 5 2010 or 2011 ?.... ;-) It will be nice if it is indeed actually released. I didn't want to wait any longer so I pulled the trigger on a PCD-35.

[Sneakle]

This PCD-35 is a little beyond my reach. This looks like the best option for my workflow, if it exists. But at a grand still overpriced IMHO. But that ground has been covered.

[Steve Smull]

If it's finally graduating from vaporware status I can't wait to see how it performs.

Two P2 slots, two Express/ SxS slots, two compact flash slots and connectivity to eSATA externals plus a host of other goodies... via PCIe and/or Express card... woo-hoo! A quick google search netted prices under $800 but we'll see if those are placeholders or real prices. If it works as advertised and the drivers are reliable for P2 and Snow Leopard it's pretty compelling.

[Steve Smull]

Interesting workflow possibility with these is P2 to Express Card SSD right in the unit. 64 Gb Express Card SSD's are availabe for around $200 ... hmmm, no need for a hard drive at all in this scenario. I wonder if you could use the 2 Express card slots to redundantly copy a P2 card to two Express Card SSD's at the same time.

Compact and durable, no hard drive required. Then when you got to your desktop you could hook up the same Qio to your PCIe connection and offload your Express Card SSD's. Or just hand one off in the field and keep one as backup. As express card SSD's drop in price a small stack of these would be reasonable to own, and would fit in a shirt pocket.

[Sneakle]

Interesting workflow possibility with these is P2 to Express Card SSD right in the unit. 64 Gb Express Card SSD's are availabe for around $200 ... hmmm, no need for a hard drive at all in this scenario. I wonder if you could use the 2 Express card slots to redundantly copy a P2 card to two Express Card SSD's at the same time.

Compact and durable, no hard drive required. Then when you got to your desktop you could hook up the same Qio to your PCIe connection and offload your Express Card SSD's. Or just hand one off in the field and keep one as backup. As express card SSD's drop in price a small stack of these would be reasonable to own, and would fit in a shirt pocket.

"p2 to Express Card SSD right in the unit". That's an interesting idea. I need to go back and read up to see if possible.

[Sneakle]

Yea, you're right, the product info (http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/666380-REG/Sonnet_QIO_PCIE_Qio_Universal_Media_Reader.html) says can copy files between cards.

[hotchkiss]

This PCD-35 is a little beyond my reach. This looks like the best option for my workflow, if it exists. But at a grand still overpriced IMHO. But that ground has been covered.

Yeah, 2K for a card reader is a tough pill to swallow. My duel (2nd) had died, and I was already a month without a card reader, so I needed to take the plunge.

I hope the Qio actually is released.

[Sneakle]

I sent an email to Sonnet asking about availability of the QIO. Here is response:

>Right now, we're shipping the Qio in limited quantities. We're currently going through our backlog of this item and shipping them out according to the date that the order was placed. If you're interested, I would advise that you place your order through our web site so that you are in the queue to receive the Qio.

[Steve Smull]

Sonnet web site now says Feb 15; still being pushed back. On the + side, I asked for a price quote from Provantage. Got an email quoting $781 which is quite a bit less than the 999 MSRP.

http://www.provantage.com/

[ggrantly]

With a sata interface, will this gizmo copy a memory card direct to a drive without a CPU?

Wouldn't that be nice.

Grant

[Sneakle]

It's now a moot point. Panasonic announced a p2 card reader (http://www.studiodaily.com/studiomonthly/tools/gearup/11907.html) for $350 due in April.

[Richard Sutcliffe]

It definately is not a moot point. USB is just useless to me. For $1000 esata speeds with the ability to connect to desktop or laptop and compatibility with numerous RAIDS CF, SxS and P2 is value for money. Website says in stock now. I just want to see some benchmarks before I commit.

[Barry_Green]

Depends on what you're offloading, I guess. From the posted benchmarks, the QIO doesn't seem to be any faster than a USB P2 reader, and actually slower.

There has to be something wrong though... it should be way faster than what they've posted.

[RyanBellaCine]

Depends on what you're offloading, I guess. From the posted benchmarks, the QIO doesn't seem to be any faster than a USB P2 reader, and actually slower.

There has to be something wrong though... it should be way faster than what they've posted.


Barry, where are the benchmarks for this?

We just got one in and are disappointed to find that downloading from two P2 cards at once divides the transfer rate in half. And our cards are old "R" series cards which apparently are really really slow. I'm only getting 28MBps transfer speeds off a single card. It cuts down to 14MBps each card when downloading from two P2 cards. And that's going to 2 different, very high speed, hard drives. Not what we expected. We figured we could get double the bandwidth with both cards running at once.

We've only had this thing installed for an hour. But we wanted to find out why we are getting low transfer speeds via P2. Tranfering data to a eSata drive from another source works great. 90MBps. Which is what that drive would be rated for. None of the other ports have been tested by us yet.

[Barry_Green]

They had a graphic posted that showed their P2 transfer speeds.

Your anticipation is right -- if you were using a Panasonic five-slot reader, you could get 2x the transfer speed, especially if going to two different drives. I don't know what's with the QIO, but I haven't heard much encouraging about its P2 transfer. Sounds to me like they just didn't do a good job on the P2 side of it.

You can put multiple cards in one of the Panasonic readers and get huge effective bandwidth transfer rates. You can put five cards in a PCD35 and get the full 2.5gbps transfer rate over all five cards. I would expect the QIO could do the same thing, but so far it doesn't sound like it.

[RyanBellaCine]

Would a 800 or 1.2GB P2 card transfer at their top speeds, or are the P2 ports just plan limited to USB2/ FW400?

I'm not really sure what the speed is on our R series cards. I couldn't find any of those specs on them.

EDIT : Nevermind I just saw the small chart on the product page.

http://www.sonnettech.com/product/qio.html

[Barry_Green]

The cards' transfer speed is limited by whatever the slowest link in the chain is. If you're transferring by USB, then you'll be limited by USB speed. If you're transferring via PCD35, then the only thing limiting your transfer speed will probably be the hard disk you're transferring to.

[k2director]

The Sonnet is indeed slow at P2 speeds (tests with E series cards): http://www.varicaminla.com/blog/2010/4/7/sonnet-qio-not-so-fast.html

I was disappointed. If the QIO can transfer SxS cards much faster, there's no technical reason why P2 cards can't transfer as fast or faster.