bitwalk's posterous

Test of SanDisk Extreme FireWire Reader

I have a camera that outputs huge image files. Some time ago I got tired of waiting for images to download to my computer so I ordered the fastest thing I could find:

  • SanDisk Extreme FireWire Reader

Today I decided to test if it really works. After ordering it I realized that maybe I just have a memory card that is too slow? I normally use a SanDisk Ultra II 8 GB card. But it turns out this unit seem to be worth the money.
My totally unscientific test reveals quite a significant speed increase:
In my test I copied 10 full resolution .raw files from a regular USB2 multi card reader and the FireWire reader to my internal disk using the 'cp' command from a mac os terminal (see screenshot).

Regular USB-2 Multi Card Reader:
real 1m41.443s
user 0m0.002s
sys 0m0.548s

SanDisk Extreme FireWire Reader:
real 0m28.385s
user 0m0.002s
sys 0m0.377s

(download)