CF Cards take *FOREVER* to download to computer

S

saaby

Well-known member
Hi friends,

In my personal work I use a GH1 which shoots on SD cards.

At work I use a 7D which, as you know, shoots on CF.

For some reason copying files from the 7D takes significantly longer!

Copying 7 Gb of data from a SDHC card takes about 7 minutes. Maybe 10 at most.

Copying 7 Gb of data from the CF cards takes close to an hour.

In both cases I'm using an i7 27" iMac.

Readers I'm using:
USB connected to the 7D itself
Cheap USB reader off eBay
Old SanDisk Imagemate 6-in-1 (It's certainly USB 2.0 though)

The cards are Sandisk Ultra 8 Gb and they say 30 MB/s on the front.

Obviously the camera can write video to them in realtime, and the camera can playback video in realtime, but it takes longer than realtime to copy the video.

My hunch is the reader? I thought maybe an UDMA reader would help, but these cards dont' say UDMA on them anywhere so I don't think they're actually UDMA cards. :furious3:
 
When I connect my 7D to my laptop, the download is always reasonably fast. An hour for 7 gigs? No way.

I use Lexar 16 GB 300x cards.

If your cards are cheap quality, that's probably your problem, especially if the download is slow when the camera is connected to the computer via USB.
 
Double check the USB port - not all ports even on the same computer are the same speed. Shouldn't take an hour, but 20 minutes for a loaded 16gb card would seem to be acceptable.
 
Get a Lexar FW800 reader and watch your times accelerate like a meth-fueled weasel.

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Ok -- I'll see I can talk a few $$ out of the budget for the Firewire reader. Shouldn't be too tough, but since we're not a media house (I am the entire media department...) sometimes you hit a snag.
 
Are you hooking up to the USB port on the keyboard or directly into the console?

I can easily hit 10MB/s on a USB reader and 30MB/s on an internal expresscard reader.
 
I've also run into this issue with a PCMCIA adapter. The laptop was older, but the insane times make no sense whatsoever, especially taking into account how fast P2s download on the same computer.
 
Only the newer all in one sandisk usb readers reach transferspeeds of 30Mb/s
older and many cheap ofmarket models only reach 5Mb/sec
conecting the camera directly to the computer also results in transferspeeds of 30Mb/s
 
If you can't get your hands on the firewire reader right away, I was recently surprised to discover that connecting the 7D itself to the computer is a lot faster than a USB card reader. I had always assumed it'd be the other way around. I mean, a LOT faster.
 
avian said:
older and many cheap ofmarket models only reach 5Mb/sec
conecting the camera directly to the computer also results in transferspeeds of 30Mb/s
Click to expand...

Kellar42 said:
connecting the 7D itself to the computer is a lot faster than a USB card reader. I had always assumed it'd be the other way around. I mean, a LOT faster.
Click to expand...

Ding ding ding ding ding! You both win!

Turns out that, like a commercial plane crash, this was a comedy of errors.

Before we forked out for a card reader, we decided to benchmark the card. We remembered that we were running iStat Menus which would tell us this. In the Sandisk card reader the cards were reading at a cozy and steady 2 MB/s!!! I kid you not. 2 MB/s. Just let that sink in for a minute.

We had hooked the 7D up once before, but it worked pretty poorly for some reason. In that case we were trying to go through iPhoto I think. It worked, but took forever. This time we went through image capture. Image capture was giving us an error, and at this point my co-worker told me that he'd tried to use the Canon software to remote control the 7D the week before and it wouldn't work either.

So then we were starting to zero in on the problem...a combination of both the computer and the card reader. We tried hooking up the 7D directly to my MacBook Pro -- we'd never done this before because of bad experience hooking the 7D to the iMac.

A 43 second 1080P24 clip took 1:25 to copy using the SanDisk reader. It copied in :16 going straight through the 7D. BIG DIFFERENCE!

So then we unhooked everything from the iMac, rebooted it, and now it's working gloriously.

We were both a bit embarrassed that we've put up with this for the past several months, but we've just been so busy that it's been easier to just let the computer chug along copying data at a glacial pace than to stop and properly troubleshoot the thing.

Anyway, thanks all for your help. We'll probably keep using the camera directly for now, but it's good to know that the FW800 card would also be beneficial. (I feared getting the FW800 reader and having it only improve read speeds by like 20%. From our tests it would be more like 500-600%)

Thanks again!
 
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