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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Transfer 4 CF Cards simultaneously - New Product!

michael zaletel

michael zaletel

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http://www.delkin.com/products/connect/readers/imagerouter.html#

This is a pretty cool new product called the ImageRouter for roughly $129 without the software and $229 with the software I think. Shipping May 2008.

From their site:

Whether you come back from a shoot with four or fourteen CompactFlash cards, you will spend a significant amount of time transferring your images to a computer. Constantly having to load and unload cards from a reader means you are tied to your desk during the whole process. ImageRouter frees you from your desk and greatly improves workflow efficiency by doing this work for you. With ImageRouter, you now can spend more time taking photographs, not managing files.

-shooter
 
Erik Greensmith said:
Why not daisy-chain 4 Lexar FW800 readers? They even snap together.
Click to expand...

The Image Router is USB2.0. Ive read somewhere on the board (can find it, the search engine is so...) that stacked Lexar card reader did create some corrupt frames during a transfer.

I will try the Lexar daisy-chain as soon as i receive my Red. Got to see it from my own eyes.
 
USB 2.0 bus = SLOW!

Consider the Addonics SATA CF reader that I have tested at 3:15 per 8gb CF card. That's 42MB/sec transfer rate vs 19MB/sec of the Image Router (which is ambitious.)

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/accelerated-compact-flash,1100.html

Then you won't mind baby sitting your CF cards since you will be done in a quarter of the time. :-)

caveats: Hot-swap of CF cards on a SATA bus requires the latest Intel motherboard chipset that supports the feature. Read the above article and I can offer insight since I have this reader on my quad-core PC w/SATA bus switched to hot-swappable.

Michael
 
Excellent info Michael. Will the Addonics SATA CF Adapter work on a Mac Pro? What else is needed for that?

-shooter
 
shooter said:
Excellent info Michael. Will the Addonics SATA CF Adapter work on a Mac Pro? What else is needed for that?

-shooter
Click to expand...

Hmm. Not sure. Physically, it could be placed in an external 3.5" drive bay with eSata connector and should be discovered by the Mac like any other external drive. Now, whether you can hot-swap the CF cards which appear to the system as a SATA drive...

Thoughts? Anyone?

The reason I chose a PC data gathering solution is that it is independent from the post-production system(s) that I or others may use. I built it purely to serve the camera on set. Going PC allows me to customize my box in so many ways that Apple just won't support: rack mount, hot-swap SATA drive bays, CF/SATA reader bay, etc. all in one box.

If Apple wants my business, they must allow me to build my system my way, not force me to adopt their standards - as pretty as they are. Form must follow function, not vice-versa.


Michael
 
Firewire 800 (768Mb/S) is faster than USB2.0 (480MB/s.) However, there is an even greater difference in speed due to CPU bandwidth. From Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FireWire

Although high-speed USB 2.0 runs at a higher signaling rate (480 Mbit/s) than FireWire 400, typical USB PC-hosts rarely exceed sustained transfers of 280 Mbit/s, with 240 Mbit/s being more typical. This is likely due to USB's reliance on the host-processor to manage low-level USB protocol, whereas FireWire delegates the same tasks to the interface hardware. For example, the FireWire host interface supports memory-mapped devices, which allows high-level protocols to run without loading the host CPU with interrupts and buffer-copy operations.[17]

FireWire 800 is substantially faster than Hi-Speed USB.[18]


Michael
 
I am working a fire wire 800 lexar CF reader connected to a express card slot with 800 on macbook pro and it only take about 5 minutes. Do they make an express/34 CF adaptor so I can skip fire wire 800 all together and pipe right on down?

Also, if you use mini mobile hard drives like Lacies or the Glyph drives make sure you get ones with 7200rpm disk...I notice a considerable speed bump when going to the 7200rpm vs 5400rpm. Of course there is the argument that the 7200rpm drives are more likely to fail sooner since they are spinning faster. I just want speed...these drives are mainly used for transferring data anyways.
 
Haskell; actually, 5 minutes with your FW800 setup is pretty good. My CF->SATA reads a full 8GB card in 3:15.

Which model is that? I may wish to add it to my laptop's express/34 FW800 card.

Michael
 
Hey Michael...I should mention we did not make a habbit of running the cards all the way down to 8gigs before swapping out so i take that back but it was less the real time for sure. Its the Lexar FireWire 800 CF reader.
 
The Addonics reader cannot read RED CF cards on my system :sad:
 
We use the little Sandisk Firewire 800 readers. They look cool, are wicked fast to MacBook Pro laptops in the field and knock wood pretty much error free. I'm thinking 4 cards at once would be a bit of a bandwidth traffic jam though. Still it would be nice to have it something you could stash away transferring and get back to work.

Noah
 
Do people have problems with the Lexar FW800 reader? It's worked fine for us and is plenty fast. Just curious...
 
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