SD card footage transfer speed bottleneck? New laptop revealed things....

Blackout

Blackout

Veteran
Hey everyone,

I just got a new high end laptop for on set dumping and playback. It's a total beast of a machine and really kicks a$$.

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/search?Ntt=msi+gx660r-060us&N=0&InitialSearch=yes

NOTHING available at any store beat these specs or price. I was all set to buy a dell xps 15 but they went and screwed my order over and said they had no more 1080p led screens so I cancelled and did some research and went into B & H and plunked down the cash for this monster. I was a little worried as I had never heard of msi and this much power at this price seemed too good to be true. The thing practically beats my quad core 3.2 ghz desktop tower I call the "Deathstar Mothership".

Getting used to the LED monitor is a little weird. It's BRIGHT! It will burn your eyes out at brightest settings, but it was a little blue for my taste and I had to do some calibrating but now I am very happy with it. The angle has to be dead on which is a bit annoying, but that is my only complaint - other than that... it's RAZOR sharp and clear, and it also has mind blowing good LOUD sound for a laptop! No little tiny tin sounding speakers. This thing rocks. 4.8 out of 5 stars. Did I mention it comes with 2 320 gb 7200 rpm hard drives in raid 0 config? Insanity!

In any case, up till now I had been connecting my GH1 into a usb and dumping footage and I always got around 7mb a second no matter what usb port I used (front or back) on my desktop, even if I used a card reader.

Well, I went to dump some footage into the built in card reader on this laptop and low and behold I got 23 to 26 MEGS per second sustained transfer rate on my transcend class 10 32 gb cards! 21 megs per second transfer rate on the Panasonic gold 16 gb class 10.

This blew me away!

What is the bottleneck on my desktop? USB 2.0? Older mother board? Bios update? Need to spend money on a better card reader? I had no idea I was waisting so much time and that the cards could go that fast. The laptop is USB 3.0 4 ports, and a multi card reader, blu-ray... top of the line ati 5870 mobility gfx card I mean it can even run the latest games on full ultra detail on at 1920 x 1080p without a stutter. Mind blowing, but I need to get the footage into my desktop just as fast. My wireless N network isn't that fast, so is there some sort of usb 3.0 to 2.0 cable to transfer direct from the hard drive of the laptop to my raid
hard drives inside my desktop? Or can I get something to get the same speed on the desktop that I get on this laptop? What's the bottleneck?

- Blackout
 
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I would remove the PCI USB 2.0 card on my desktop and replace them with USB 3.0 ones, they are fast cheap and easy to replace, that would be my first step.
 
It's not a card it's just part of the evga x58 motherboard... so... just buy a usb 3.0 card? pci express? reg pci? Don't know much about usb 3.0 but it seems a blazin.....

And for transferring the files... is there some sort of direct usb 3.0 cable to go from one computer to the other for super fast transfers rather than trying to go over my wireless network which is slow as bean soup on a frozen tundra?
 
Companies like MSI, FOXCONN and ASUS make the predominant number of laptops that are rebranded for companies like Dell, HP, etc. Chances are that you bought something that is the same as a high end laptop like Alienware but not branded as such.
 
Blackout said:
It's not a card it's just part of the evga x58 motherboard... so... just buy a usb 3.0 card? pci express? reg pci? Don't know much about usb 3.0 but it seems a blazin.....

And for transferring the files... is there some sort of direct usb 3.0 cable to go from one computer to the other for super fast transfers rather than trying to go over my wireless network which is slow as bean soup on a frozen tundra?
Click to expand...

Yes, just a USB 3.0 PCI Express Card $29.00, speed priceless. Your motherboard should be fine.
 
@soarprod

Damn! your little $30 card reader looks great but it's out of stock at b&h and I need this thing NOW!

As for my bus speed... I have no idea... I got what was considered one of the best motherboards at the time.. evga x58 but I don't know what the bus speed is... is it listed in my win 7 properties somewhere?

Svart! Awesome... this is what I was thinking because this thing has all name brand components and a comparable alienware was about TWICE the price! It is shaped VERY much like the alienware now that I think about it and has the same cool glowing breathing led lights all around it. I am still really BLOWN away at the power at this price. It's built solid too.

Only negative is of course, battery life is right at about 2 hours if doing blu-ray or any high end stuff... maybe 3 hours in economy mode. But.. all the power laptops are like that. Ya gotta bring your plug and extra bats.

I'm going to pickup a usb 3.0 card, a portable external usb 3.0 hd.... that should do the trick... but I still ask, is there anyway to go usb 3.0 to usb 3.0 and "dock" the computers some how for ultra fast transfers of my dumped footage on the laptop (Brothership) to the desktop (Mothership)?
 
Blackout said:
As for my bus speed... I have no idea... I got what was considered one of the best motherboards at the time.. evga x58 but I don't know what the bus speed is... is it listed in my win 7 properties somewhere?
Click to expand...


eVGA x58
------------
System Bus - 4.8GT/s to 6.4GT/s

MSI GX660R-060US
------------------------
System Bus - 2.5GT/s


Looks like you should be getting double the transfer speed of your laptop out of your desktop. Bottleneck indeed.
 
Well I would say its your card reader on the desktop. Connect the USB reader to the laptop and see if you get the same transfer rates. USB 2.0 is capable of a theoretical 480Mbps (megabits not bytes) which should have more than enough overhead to move the files at 20 megabytes.

My USB reader reads at ~20 on an X58 board using the sometimes questionable Transcend Class 10 16GB cards.
 
It's in stock at adorama.

also amazon - http://www.amazon.com/Lexar-Dual-Sl...RZI2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1293038140&sr=8-1

Blackout said:
@soarprod

Damn! your little $30 card reader looks great but it's out of stock at b&h and I need this thing NOW!

As for my bus speed... I have no idea... I got what was considered one of the best motherboards at the time.. evga x58 but I don't know what the bus speed is... is it listed in my win 7 properties somewhere?

Svart! Awesome... this is what I was thinking because this thing has all name brand components and a comparable alienware was about TWICE the price! It is shaped VERY much like the alienware now that I think about it and has the same cool glowing breathing led lights all around it. I am still really BLOWN away at the power at this price. It's built solid too.

Only negative is of course, battery life is right at about 2 hours if doing blu-ray or any high end stuff... maybe 3 hours in economy mode. But.. all the power laptops are like that. Ya gotta bring your plug and extra bats.

I'm going to pickup a usb 3.0 card, a portable external usb 3.0 hd.... that should do the trick... but I still ask, is there anyway to go usb 3.0 to usb 3.0 and "dock" the computers some how for ultra fast transfers of my dumped footage on the laptop (Brothership) to the desktop (Mothership)?
Click to expand...
 
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