View Full Version : What would cause a doubling of my trasfer times??
Richard Sutcliffe
08-04-2006, 05:52 AM
Hey all,
Shooting DVCPRO50 to 8gb P2 cards. offloading through the PCMCIA slot on a power book onto lacie FW800 drives. I ran tests before the shoot and got times of 6mins for a full card to transfer. Into the shoot the times have slowed down to well over double the pre-shoot tests.
Can anyone offer advice, P2 log as its the only soft loaded since the tests.. I think. Its been getting incrementally slower during the course of a 3 day shoot.
Its not the drives filling up as Im onto another lacie now and its still taking 15 mins rather than 6.
Backing up the drive to a G5 internal disk via FW800 runs at 2gb a minute so Im suspecting its the powerbook which has issues..
Richard Sutcliffe
08-04-2006, 05:55 AM
Update.. Im transferring cards at the moment. A different card copying to the same drive just ran in 6 mins. The card before, identical process. seconds apart ran at almost 15... Im bemused...
RDykmans
08-04-2006, 08:27 AM
It's a mystery to me as well as I occasionally have the same problem when transferring files from my P2 Store. I notice it generally happens when the whole card (4 gig in my case) is one clip or very large clips.
Green Hornet
08-05-2006, 10:37 AM
if you are doing it by hand, I have heard that you need to transfer the text file first, or it will be slow
kstnate
08-06-2006, 12:21 PM
also, you must be wearing a blue shirt. Patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time also can increase load time by 30%. :)
Seriously, this copy time seems to happen to a lot of people including me and makes me feel like nobody really knows what is going on with these things we call computers. Anybody with a real answer would be appreciated.
As your destination drive gets more full it will slow down as well. I have also found that 4GB of small clips transfers MUCH faster than a 4GB card with one large clip.... not sure why...
ash =o)
Milezee
08-07-2006, 09:09 AM
Data transfer to the outer edge of a hard disk is always a lot faster than to the inside of the disk, rotational velocities and all that. I've benchmarked this to see for my self by putting a small partition at the beginning of the disk and at the end. There was about a 40% difference in sustained transfer rates.
kstnate
08-07-2006, 02:25 PM
well, that makes a lot of sense. At least some of odd behavior has a logical explanation.
Richard Sutcliffe
08-07-2006, 08:31 PM
If you look at my second post the second card I ingested took 6 mins, the card before it took 12-15mins, same size card, same drive, same powerbook. The drive had more data yet it transferred quicker. Plus, the extra read/write time for the disk on the outside cannot be as substantial as to double the time taken to transfer data, surely.