Very but very slow transfert!!!

K

kabtv

Well-known member
hi Guys, i'm in the middle of a shooting in Florida for two documentaries of one hour each. Every day, i fill up my four 16gb(720p30pn) and head up for the transfert(drag and drop) on two hard drives(LaCie two big something...1 TO each). My laptop is an Acer Aspire 5100, AMD Turion 64, 2.2GHZ, 512KB L2 cache, 256MB ATI Radeon Xpress with a 120GB hdd.
My problem is than when i offload my P2 cards(directly from my laptop) it take eternity for one card to be done. My transfert rate is between 6mb/s(from the pci card reader of my laptop to one hard drive LaCie at the time, it's very too long for two hdd in the same time) and 20mb(from the pci card to the hdd of my laptop). In the HVX Book, the transfert rate is, if i well remember, +- 50mb/s.
Do the math with 4 x 16GB, two times(for the back up) with a transfert rate between 6 and 20mb/s and you will understand that i go to bed very very late to start my next day very, very too soon...

Is Anybody got an idea of:

What's going on here ? and

What can i do to give some speed to my offloading problem ?

Thanks from a very tired DOP.
 
On a modern laptop you should be able to transfer a 16GB card in about 8 minutes. And you should be able to transfer to the internal laptop drive and to the external drive simultaneously with no slowdown. So transferring all four cards to both drives SHOULD take you under 40 minutes.

If it's taking longer than that, there's something configured wrong with your hardware.
 
Thanks Barry for the quick answer...

what should i change or look about in the configuration ?
 
I don't know what might be going wrong; I'm just trying to point out to you what normal behavior is, which will hopefully guide you towards figuring out what's wrong with your system. Maybe Kholi or one of our other hardware hotrodders can help you find the exact settings or where the issue is happening.
 
Thanks again Barry, i just sent him a mail...i will keep my fingers crossed...!!!

i forgot to mention that i use Vista....
 
Kab, what are you using to connect the External Hard-Drives to your Laptop? USB2.0/Firewire 400 or are they Firewire 800? In addition, does your laptop have native Firewire support or are you using add-on cards? If so, what type of add-on card for Firewire support because that may be your problem.

Barry's right about the offload time. I have a PCMCIA slot in my old-school Dell and a PCMCIA Firewire 400 card. For a 16gb Card in my old Dell it's about 12 minutes to feed it through the PCMCIA slot through BUS and back out of the PCMCIA via Firewire. I also have an OLD Dell and your Laptop sounds like it's much newer than my own. You should be seeing faster transfer times even if you were spitting the card out directly from your HVX200.
 
i use USB2.0, don't have firewire with this laptop...they offered me a Mac with firewire but i read horror stories here when offloading with mac. i'm offloading right now 14.4GB and it's half way done and still 20 min to go...average of 5.73mb/s. is there any setting i can change ?
 
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To be honest you probably should've taken the Mac with Firewire transfer. I think the reason that you're getting insanely slow transfers is the bandwidth of USB being tapped.

The Bandwidth of USB2.0 = 480 and Firewire = 400 HOWEVER bus speeds of USB devices generally don't use anywhere near that much. Firewire bandwidth peripherals generally have bus power that can utilize the entire 400. Same thing with Sata drives.

There's no real setting you can change, unfortunately. No matter which way you go you're going to be spending more time if you're using USB2.0 as the intermediate between laptop bus and external HDD bus.

You could try offloading a card to the internal and THEN shipping it over to the external, deleting, etc. I think that might take just as much time.

What you should probably invest in, for the future, is a PCMCIA Firewire card. Because the PCMCIA adapter alots for full use of speed, a Firewire 400 card will see it's full potential.

That's what I'm using as of now.

If you can, ask for the Mac and make sure you click on the read/write protect on the cards when you use them. Again, that might be your best bet.
 
Kholi said:
You could try offloading a card to the internal and THEN shipping it over to the external, deleting, etc. I think that might take just as much time..
Click to expand...

Already tried this and yes, it's a little bit faster...and sometime it's the différence between going to bed at 1am instead of 2:30am.

Kholi said:
What you should probably invest in, for the future, is a PCMCIA Firewire card. Because the PCMCIA adapter alots for full use of speed, a Firewire 400 card will see it's full potential..
Click to expand...

What do you mean by that, can i have a PCMCIA Firewire card install in my laptop...?



Kholi said:
If you can, ask for the Mac and make sure you click on the read/write protect on the cards when you use them. Again, that might be your best bet.
Click to expand...

i'm more a PC kind of guy but if i don't have the choice i will bet on quality time...and take the Mac.
 
You should try the mac out. Just remember to slide the read/write tab over on the P2 Card before you insert into the computer to protect the data and you'll be fine.
 
i think there is something wrong with my laptop...i'm offloading directly on the computer hard drive and the max speed is 19mb/s(it's a big 10min for 8.71GB), two time less than normal. i'm freaking a little bit here too cause i can't check my footage on this laptop, it can't play any clip with P2 Viewer...i saw them on both hard drive but can't watch them....
 
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David S. said:
All that does is add FW ports to a PC Card bus slot.

They've been around for a while
Click to expand...

So can i use one FW port for importing from my HVX200 thru the computer and the two others ones for exporting directly to the external HHDs ?
 
If you mean right now...i'm using the pcmcia port to offload...but with the adaptor, i was thinking using the hvx for offloading...and using the pcmcia slot for the fw ports.
 
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