What would cause a doubling of my trasfer times??

Richard Sutcliffe

Well-known member
Hey all,

Shooting DVCPRO50 to 8gb P2 cards. offloading through the PCMCIA slot on a power book onto lacie FW800 drives. I ran tests before the shoot and got times of 6mins for a full card to transfer. Into the shoot the times have slowed down to well over double the pre-shoot tests.

Can anyone offer advice, P2 log as its the only soft loaded since the tests.. I think. Its been getting incrementally slower during the course of a 3 day shoot.

Its not the drives filling up as Im onto another lacie now and its still taking 15 mins rather than 6.

Backing up the drive to a G5 internal disk via FW800 runs at 2gb a minute so Im suspecting its the powerbook which has issues..
 
Update.. Im transferring cards at the moment. A different card copying to the same drive just ran in 6 mins. The card before, identical process. seconds apart ran at almost 15... Im bemused...
 
It's a mystery to me as well as I occasionally have the same problem when transferring files from my P2 Store. I notice it generally happens when the whole card (4 gig in my case) is one clip or very large clips.
 
also, you must be wearing a blue shirt. Patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time also can increase load time by 30%. :)
Seriously, this copy time seems to happen to a lot of people including me and makes me feel like nobody really knows what is going on with these things we call computers. Anybody with a real answer would be appreciated.
 
As your destination drive gets more full it will slow down as well. I have also found that 4GB of small clips transfers MUCH faster than a 4GB card with one large clip.... not sure why...



ash =o)
 
Data transfer to the outer edge of a hard disk is always a lot faster than to the inside of the disk, rotational velocities and all that. I've benchmarked this to see for my self by putting a small partition at the beginning of the disk and at the end. There was about a 40% difference in sustained transfer rates.
 
If you look at my second post the second card I ingested took 6 mins, the card before it took 12-15mins, same size card, same drive, same powerbook. The drive had more data yet it transferred quicker. Plus, the extra read/write time for the disk on the outside cannot be as substantial as to double the time taken to transfer data, surely.
 
Back
Top