Shortest P2 downloading times

monkeyking

monkeyking

Well-known member
Without consulting Barry's book, what are the shortest , optimal dnld times for 4, 8 and 16 gb cards. I get less than 5 min/4gb card on my Powerbook 1.67, FW800/7200rpm HD and internal 7200 HD downloading simultaneously.
any speed difference btw P2Genie vs P2LogPro/HD Log ?

Are the Panny 5 card readers any quicker using FW800 ?

curious.
 
For the fastest offload times you have to identify where the bottleneck is. It could be the hard drive you're offloading to, or it could be the cable you're using to connect to that hard drive, etc.

The P2 card is capable of transferring data at 640 megabits per second. The firewire 400 cable maxxes out at 400 megabits, so if you were transferring over firewire, obviously that's going to limit your transfer speed.

USB is worse; it claims a maximum 480 megabits but that's really just a "burst" rate; in practice it's slower, especially on Macs.

Firewire 800 is fast enough to handle the full speed of the card, so that wouldn't be a bottleneck.

But the drive you transfer to is usually the biggest bottleneck. On my old Dell laptop it took 4 minutes to transfer a 4gb card, using the internal PCMCIA slot and going directly to the internal drive. On my new laptop it takes about 2:30 to transfer that same card. What's the difference? A better/faster SATA hard disk, rather than the Dell's IDE drive.

So if you want to increase your transfer speed, the best thing to do is transfer to a better drive. Something like a FW800 G-Raid would likely result in faster real-world transfers than any internal hard disk.
 
Can you get faster transfer speed on an older laptop (your old Dell for ex.) if you have an external FW800 G-Raid?

And one more question: there is any utility that automatically downloads the content from a P2 card as soon as is inserted in the PCMCIA slot?

Thank you, Barry.
 
Yes, P2 Genie does that for you.

And yes, you should be able to get faster transfers to an external RAID. I'd tell you conclusively, but my FW800 ExpressCard card is useless; it installs and connects but it takes 10x longer to offload through FW800 than it does through FW400 so there's something just horribly wrong there...
 
raid 0? very scary.... i would lie awake all night if my footage were on raid 0, unless i had two raid 0's with copies on each....
As I have mentioned before- you can check your speed using (mac) disk activity utility and actually see megabytes per second copy times.
for some reason my times are fine when i first boot, but if i let it sit for a bit then try and copy transfer times drop to 1/3- 1/4 what they should be. haven't resolved it yet. but using disk utility alerts me immediately to a slow transfer and i can abort and reboot which fixes problem.
 
Some tests I ran recently with my macbook and A PCD 20 connected via USB ad transfering a 4 GB card to a fire wire 400 drive.

Finder copy 2:50
P2 genie Copy 2:59
HD log 5:20 if I recall properly, though I suspect something is wrong...

All times were significantly slower going with all USB connections

PCD 20 connected with FW 800 to my mac pro and copying to an internal drive is *really fast*
 
Does HD Log verify the data which is why it's a longer offload?

I wish they'd either incorporate that into P2 Log Pro or get verify in P2 Genie.
 
kstate mentioned a program for mac to monitor transfer speeds, does anyone know of a pc equivalant?
 
kstnate said:
raid 0? very scary....
Click to expand...
If I have sensitive footage that I care about, or a bigger project, all I need to do is pop in a couple of fresh drives and put them in a RAid 1. But, for general stuff, and screwing around, and stuff I don't care about, my stock drives in a raid 0 is fine.... The point was just referencing my offload times :) Which, aren't going to be much different to a raid 1 or 0.

Later,
Jason
 
So is the PDC20 a Firewire 800 Device?

On Panny's site it says just firewire?

We are going to be doing 13 TV episodes soon and I am trying to hammer out a nice P2 workflow.

I have used P2 Genie for a while. I can say that it works really nice and that the speeds from my P2 Store are slower than if you were to go from a normal PCMIA slot to a drive.
 
don't forget the bus speed.

Older macs run between 133 and 167 FSB. that is VERY slow, and it is not double piped until the later AI books.
 
HD Log does verify and is more reliable than Genie. Imagine Products is also coming with a Windows version that does the offloading (it was at NAB). Not sure about the transfer times, but bears more testing.
 
I need a way to transfer p2 to hard drive.

I was planning on using an old powerbook G4 1.25ghz to FW 800 to a raid0 external 1TB drive.

Would a powerbook be fast enough? or would it slow down too much?
 
I'm getting about 1:45 for a 4gb card using the dual adpater in the express slot on my mac book pro. Much faster than when I was using an older power book and it's internal pcmcia slot.
 
Masta T said:
I need a way to transfer p2 to hard drive.

I was planning on using an old powerbook G4 1.25ghz to FW 800 to a raid0 external 1TB drive.

Would a powerbook be fast enough? or would it slow down too much?
Click to expand...
The processor doesn't have to work very hard to offload, it's just a file copy, so the Powerbook you have should be fine for this.

However, I would do some testing (copy at least a dozen P2 cards and import the footage into FCP ) before you commit to this setup because there are some situations where the Mac seems to corrupt P2 data. Write-protecting the cards seems to be one way to guard against this.
 
n8ture said:
Does HD Log verify the data which is why it's a longer offload?

I wish they'd either incorporate that into P2 Log Pro or get verify in P2 Genie.
Click to expand...

P2 Genie for Windows does verify and I know Anders (the Mac-developer) is working on an update with verification based on MD5 as far as I remember.
 
Testing my 16gb card on Powerbook 1.67 w/7200rpm internal HD(PATA) and FW800 7200rpm external HDD (PATA) still takes 12 -20 min. using P2 Genie/HD Log.
As cards get bigger downloading will take longer, especially with the newer 4/5 slot cameras. It could take me over an hour to dnld 4 cards. Would replacing my PATA(IDE) external HD with a SATA drive running on FW800 improve dnld times?
A PCD 20 FW800 thru my PB ties up the FW800 port- I'd have to feed my HDD thru FW400 port. Or is it better to connect PCD 20 to PB w/FW400 and use FW800 to the HDD?
PCD 20 can dnld up to 5 cards sequentially/automatically /unattended in my hotel room so I can go the bar after 12hr shoot day ? That's the question.
 
Yes you can set the 5 cards up of offload in the PCD20 and go to the bar. ;-) We have had the P2 Drive offload to a PC over the USB up to 550 MBs, all five cards were offloading simultaneously. The faster the port, the faster the offload.

I have been playing with the prototype of the P2 Gear and working its off load and have clocked it at about 2GBs a minute.

Hope that helps,

Jan
 
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