FS7: XQD 128GB Transfer times to portable HDD

B

bengiles

Well-known member
XQD Cards are thin on the ground in the UK this week - all dealers awaiting stock. I was trying to buy another 128GB or 2 x 64GB yesterday.

So we're going to have to be mindful about backup times out in the mountains next week. Here are the transfer times for a 128GB full card (actually showed Card Full at 115GB), transferring via MBP Retina to an external bus-powered 7200RPM 1TB 2.5" HDD. Obviously YMMV, but this hopefully gives a guide to anyone who gets caught out and doesn't have time to test:

Via Catalyst Browse (sends all metadata and supposedly with quality checksum verification) - 24 mis 42 secs

Via Mac Finder (just the MXF file alone with no sidecar metadata etc) - 20 mins 0 secs

Ben.
 
The camera runs on rocking horse shi_t

You could try some photo dealers who stock the nikon D4.

Calumet had an over priced 32gb!

S
 
Got the last one at Digi Broadcast. Phew...

Calumet want the same money for a 64 that everyone else is charging for a 128.

Thanks Sam. Hope the shoot went well yesterday.
 
Obviously not super cost effective but if you get an SSD instead of the 7200rpm drive, you'd see better offload times. When I offload my 256GB Odyssey SSDs using Thunderbolt to my Thunderbolt RAID (a bit faster read/write than SSD, but the overall transfer would be limited by the Odyssey SSD), it takes about 15min to unload a 256GB drive.

So it might be worth getting one or two 1TB SSDs, if it lets you unload significantly faster. Might be the only alternative if there are no XQD cards in sight.
 
When I tested transfer speeds I discovered that it comes down to the USB3 drivers being used and the destination drive and the USB3 drivers on that side also. Everything and the stars have to be aligned in order to get 400MB/s offload otherwise it's more realistic to get up to 225MB/s.
 
On a recent shoot we had 3 fs7 with 128gb cards. Dumping them over usb3 using my MacBook air to seagate 2tb bus powered disks took 15-20 minutes, UNLESS we had some long takes on the cards, then transfer times slowed down to 40 minutes.
We didn't figure out what was wrong the first time until it happened for the second time and both times we had some very long takes on the cards. So be aware
 
Doesn't USB3 have trouble holding high sustained rates as opposed to burst speeds (ie smaller files?). I have noticed this a few times transferring media on my comp via USB 3. Of course it could just be all anecdotal.
 
Yoak said:
On a recent shoot we had 3 fs7 with 128gb cards. Dumping them over usb3 using my MacBook air to seagate 2tb bus powered disks took 15-20 minutes, UNLESS we had some long takes on the cards, then transfer times slowed down to 40 minutes.
We didn't figure out what was wrong the first time until it happened for the second time and both times we had some very long takes on the cards. So be aware
Click to expand...

The figures I quoted up top were based on one long clip, left running overnight, filling the card.

I'll be filling up 128GB cards with multiple shorter clips next week - it will be interesting to see whether transfer speeds change with multiple clips.

Ben.
 
Liam Hall said:
Not sure long takes have much to do with it. I bet a quick reboot would have restored the speed.
Click to expand...
I'm not 100% sure either as we didn't do any "controlled" tests, but same thing happend on both my MacBook air and the editor's macbookpro. On the two occasions I would guess we had 2-3 takes that where int the region of 30 minutes plus shorter clips.
 
Sounds like you guys are all testing the speed of your slow 2.5" hard drives... those usually top out around 40-80MBps depending how full they are. If you want faster speeds, you need a destination drive that can keep up. 3.5" drives might get you in the 100-200MBps range for sequential copies, but really you need a RAID or SSD to use the full read speed of your cards.
 
Well, the op asked about transfer speed to portable hdd, so then I assume bus powered 2.5" disks
 
Actually the OP (me) was just stating my real world experiences, with the view that it might help others who aren't constantly buying the latest fastest thing and just want to make money out of what they've already got - 2.5" 7200RPM 1Tb/2Tb drives. :-)

On the other hand, there's other useful stuff being contributed.

Just sayin...
 
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