high speed offloading

R

Richard Sutcliffe

Well-known member
We have had a workflow dialled for a good while now and I am starting to look at ways it can be improved starting with offload speed.

Is anyone using a laptop with esata built in to offload cards? The problem I keep running into is avoiding the firewire and usb bottlenecks, they just aren't quick enough. We are Mac based but I am looking into PC laptops with esata and express card slots just for offloading to FAT32 drives.

I'm anticipating 16gb offload in about 4mins but would love to hear from someone who is using it.

Very open to suggestions on hardware.
 
There aren't likely any single hard drives that are going to give you those kind of transfer times (4GB/minute). On my laptop's internal secondary SATA hard disk, it's still about 2GB/minute. The limiting factor isn't the interface, it's the hard drive speed.

I RAIDed two hard disks together and got about 3.4GB/minute (16GB card in about 5 minutes). So if you're talking about transferring to an external eSATA RAID 0, then yes, the speeds you want are possible.

A different way to go would be to consider an SSD. Several SSDs advertise that they have minimum write speeds of over 100 megabytes per second. If that's actually true, you should be able to offload a 16GB card in around 4-5 minutes, and a 64GB card in 10 minutes.
 
Cheers Barry, yes I was thinking RAID.

I did just happen to look at Abel's blog page and saw the PCI-e version of the P2 card offload unit whose code I don't remember. Its the silver one with 5 card slots. They were suggesting 64gig offload in 10min. And theres a PCI-e adapter to express card slot for field use - although that would mean swapping out the pci-e card or buying two.

It would be a good solution for high speed offloading though. Anyone using it?
 
That unit (PCD35) is dependent on what you're offloading TO, to get those speeds. Even if you used the PCD35 and plugged it through a computer to a single eSATA drive, you're still going to get 2gb/minute. I saw someone run the PCD35 into a 3-disk SATA RAID, and watched a chock-full 64GB card get offloaded in 10 minutes and a few seconds.

I don't think you need to go that way though. If you can get a good RAIDed external eSATA drive, all you need is a decent Windows laptop with a PC Card (CardBus) slot and an ExpressCard port (or built-in eSATA port).

For the ultimate in portability, a Lenovo laptop with the CardBus card and an internal SSD in the UltraBay dock would probably be the ideal high-speed transfer station. If you can find an SSD that can sustain 100 megabytes/second write speed, you should be able to transfer a 64GB card in just over 10 minutes in an ultimately portable station.

I'm tempted to go pick up one of those SSDs just to see if it's too good to be true, but I don't have any real need for it so it'd be dough wasted on the experimental... but it'd be nice to know...
 
We've been offloading to an external esata drive from a laptop express card port for some time and it works great.
 
At last! Sonnet have delivered the product I have wanted for the past three years.

Just found the Sonnet Qio and its perfect solution for us.

Finally a product which avoids the USB & firewire bottleneck for laptop off-loading.

I have a feeling this will become a staple piece of kit on a lot of P2 shoots.
 
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