Firewire connections - a few questions **Updated with speed tests

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I keep reading about how Firewire is much faster than USB for transferring images etc and I have a few questions:

1. Can it be fitted easily to a PC?

2. Is Firewire that much faster?

3. Could my Western Digital external drives use Firewire?

The main reason I am asking is that downloading after a days shoot seems to take forever, I currently use a USB 2.0 card reader and import the images to my external drive using Lightroom. The CF cards are Sandisk Extreme III's.

Any other ideas how I could speed this up?
 
1) Firewire is easy to fit to a pc, as long as you are comfortable opening them up and fitting an expansion card (and it's out of warranty of course).

2) Having tried using USB2.0 and Firewire to transfer Video from my camcorder, Firewire is a heap load faster.

3) That will depend on whether the external drives support it. Most external drives seem to be USB, but some more expensive drives support both.

I can't really help on what you might be able to do to speed things up. If you are running the card reader or drive from a USB hub, try plugging them in directly instead.
 
There are two types of FireWire (FW). FW400 which is very close in speed to USB2.0. FW800 which is a lot faster.

Yes, it is easy to fit a FW board into a PC slot. It's as easy as putting in any other internal peripheral. Just make sure it’s a good brand, and is the FW800, to gain the speed difference.

Sorry, can’t help on the Hard Drive issue. But, I’d say unless your external drive came with FW support, then it may be hard to add FW support. A drive with FW support would clearly state so, and it would state which type of FW as well. The drives with FW support tend to be a bit more expensive than non-FW.
 
You won't gain much if you are just trying to speed up your CF card reading.

Neither USB or Firewire is bandwidth limiting your transfer, the CF card won't exceed the bandwidth of USB or Firewire.

Best bet would be just to go away and make a coffee and come back when its done.
 
1 - You can fit a Firewire PCI card into the PC if you have a available PCI slot
2 - between USB2 and Firewire 400 not significantly, between USB2 and Firewire 800 yes
3 - Only if the WD external drive has a Firewire connection.

Is the existing USB 2 card reader using a USB2 port on the PC? If yes best to go to a Firewire 800 reader & 800 PCI card, If no fit a USB 2 card to the pc.
 
Wail said:
Have a look here ...

Firewire 400 cards go for close to £20

http://www.bargainstock.co.uk/Product.asp?pid=678

Firewire 800 cards go for close to £50, and upwards ...

http://www.google.co.uk/products?q=...a=X&oi=product_result_group&resnum=1&ct=title

but there is a huge speed difference between the two.
Click to expand...

Both are a waste of money in this case.

The Extreme III has a maximum read speed of about 20 mb per second.

USB 2.0 is capable of about transfer rates up to 480 mbs or about 60 megabytes per second (3 times faster than the Extreme III can deliver)

Firewire 400 goes up to about 49 megabytes per second - about 2 times faster than the Extreme III can deliver.

Firewire 800 is massive overkill, and again is off the charts - the CF will again be the bottleneck.
 
FW800 will transfer data much faster than USB2 but is only a benefit if both devices are FW800 spec'd.
Two Firewire devices will connect and "self arbitrate" the data transfer using the fastest method whilst USB transfers are processed by the port on the chip and this results in bandwidth sharing with other USB devices that are connected.
To find out the definitive answer to your question you'd need to know whether both the read and write devices are compatable and the write speed of the WD drive. This speed could then be compared to the bandwidth available on your USB port...the overall USB speed less any other devices having calls on it. Ultimately, there is the read speed of your memory card to consider.
It's not quite as simple as the FW800 versus USB transfer speed.

Bob
 
You really do learn something new here every day!

I would never have thought of the read speed of the card being the limiting factor!

If I'm downloading a lot of big files, I stick the card in the internal card reader and just go off and do something else for a while. I dump the whole lot into a folder on my PC, sort them from there and usually only transfer the keepers to my external HD.
 
Mmmm, thanks for all the replies. The external HD does not support Firewire and that along with the card appear to be the limiting factors. I'm currently using a Hama USB 2 card reader, will the Sandisk card reader be any better?

Thanks very much, most helpful as always! :thumbs:
 
I will do a speed test for you and report shortly
 
one possibility is that even though it claims to be a USB 2 port, it may be configured as USB 1

apparently if you disconnect the device (through device manager) then reconnect it - it'll come up as USB 2

I've not been down that path - so it's all second hand whispers:shrug:
 
Hmmm - Something I've never really thought about! I always do the "go have a cup of coffee" method mentioned earlier...
 
As everyone has said it's the card that limits the transfer speed. I spoke to Lexar at Focus regarding the new uDMA cards. These are much faster at writing data. and if you need fast download these are the cards for you, but they come with a price tag.

Lexar produce special card readers ( and I think Delkin do now). However although the Firewire 800 was faster than the USB2 version, it was only about 10% faster. It still looks as though even with the new technology it's still the cards that are the limiting factor.
 
OK here we go,

I filled a 4GB Sandisk Extreme III CF (actual 3.81) and placed it in the Sandisk Imagemate 12 in 1 reader.

I then created a folder on the PC desktop and transfered the files to that folder.

On my 1st PC, slightly older, it took 7 mins to transfer all the data.

On my 2nd PC, 6 month old average spec Dell, it took 4 mins.

you could try the same test with your cards/reader and see how you get on.

cheers
 
Thanks Admirable, that's a good idea. I've now conducted a speed test using various methods of importing which I have outlined below. Using a Sandisk Extreme III 4 gb card I filled it with 270 RAW files totalling 3.64 gb.

Method 1: Download direct (copy & paste) from the Hama USB 2.0 card reader to C:\My Documents - 7min 43 sec

Method 2: Download direct (copy & paste) from the Hama USB 2.0 card reader to external Western Digital HD connected via USB 2.0 - 10min 3 sec

Method 3: Import via Lightroom from the Hama USB 2.0 card reader to external Western Digital HD connected via USB 2.0 (my usual workflow) - 26min 28 sec :eek:

The tests have thrown up some interesting results particularly with my preferred method of importing via Lightroom to the external HD. When you consider the test consisted of just one 4gb card, the download times are quite important as I often have two or three 8gb cards to download if I've been covering a large event or wedding.

To take it a bit further I downloaded using Method 2 above (direct from card reader to external HD) and then imported into Lightroom and the time for the LR import was 25min 8sec giving a combined total of 35min 11sec To say this was a disappointment is an understatement so the next test was to take the images transferred during Method 1 and then import to Lightroom directly from the C drive, the time for this was 16min 7 sec giving a total of 23min 50sec.

It looks like the USB 2.0 interfaces are what is creating the bottlenecks so I think I will have to change my workflow and import directly to the C drive via Lightrrom and then transfer them later to the external drive, unless anybody got any ideas how I can improve the download speeds whilst still using Lightroom? :shrug:
 
FireWire vs. USB 2.0 - Architecture

FireWire, uses a "Peer-to-Peer" architecture in which the peripherals are intelligent and can negotiate bus conflicts to determine which device can best control a data transfer

Hi-Speed USB 2.0 uses a "Master-Slave" architecture in which the computer handles all arbitration functions and dictates data flow to, from and between the attached peripherals (adding additional system overhead and resulting in slower data flow control)

FireWire vs. USB 2.0 Hard Drive Performance Comparison

Read and write tests to the same IDE hard drive connected using FireWire and then Hi-Speed USB 2.0 show:

Read Test:
5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 33% faster than USB 2.0
160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 70% faster than USB 2.0

Write Test:
5000 files (300 MB total) FireWire was 16% faster than USB 2.0
160 files (650MB total) FireWire was 48% faster than USB 2.0

Hope this helps
 
Erg121

Are you able to clarify on you Firewire test is that FW400 or FW800?

Tom
 
2 things,

I would try and find out the transfer speed of the Hama card reader.

How much memory does your PC have installed?
 
Hacker

In your method 3, on import into Lightroom have you got the option 'Backup To' ticked?
 
If Lightroom is like many Windows applications it will do the following

copy from card and place in a temporary cache on local hard disk
write a log on local hard disk of what it's just done
copy from cache onto remote hard disk (USB / Firewire / Network etc)
write a log on local hard disk of what it's just done

repeat above steps until card is copied (or world ends, which ever is faster)

It was even worse on my machine when I found that it was using one of my slow network drives as the cache :(


What I do is keep all active stuff on the local hard drive then when it's been processed I move it onto my network drives . It makes it MUCH faster when I'm processing images


and as everybody has said USB2 / Firewire is much faster than all current CF cards
 
Hacker said:
It looks like the USB 2.0 interfaces are what is creating the bottlenecks so I think I will have to change my workflow and import directly to the C drive via Lightrrom and then transfer them later to the external drive, unless anybody got any ideas how I can improve the download speeds whilst still using Lightroom? :shrug:
Click to expand...

Well about £50-100 gets you a 500Gb - 1Tb hard drive. Why not fit another disk into your PC and import to that, using your USB external drive for backups?
This is why I only but Extreeme III CF cards. My camera might not be able to write that fast to them, but it makes a big difference in speed to import to Lightroom.

How do you import to lightroom? If you use standard, then it imports and then renders, but you can start grading straight away. I tend to go make a coffee whilst it's doing though.
 
Thanks for everyone's help, it's been very informative and useful for this techno-phobe. :lol:

admirable said:
2 things,

I would try and find out the transfer speed of the Hama card reader.

How much memory does your PC have installed?
Click to expand...

No idea about the card reader and the PC has 2gb of RAM.

erding said:
Hacker

In your method 3, on import into Lightroom have you got the option 'Backup To' ticked?
Click to expand...

No, it's not ticked.

mrgubby said:
What I do is keep all active stuff on the local hard drive then when it's been processed I move it onto my network drives . It makes it MUCH faster when I'm processing images
Click to expand...

I've just downloaded a batch from this morning to my local hard drive and it was much much quicker, I think what I will do is keep all 'active' or recent images on the local drive and then archive to external as and when required.

Byker28i said:
Well about £50-100 gets you a 500Gb - 1Tb hard drive. Why not fit another disk into your PC and import to that, using your USB external drive for backups?
This is why I only but Extreeme III CF cards. My camera might not be able to write that fast to them, but it makes a big difference in speed to import to Lightroom.

How do you import to lightroom? If you use standard, then it imports and then renders, but you can start grading straight away. I tend to go make a coffee whilst it's doing though.
Click to expand...

That's a cracking idea about installing another HD, is it easy to do?

I'm now in two minds about how to go forward, I was thinking of getting an iMac but I may just spec a powerful PC with internal drives.
 
Fitting an extra drive is usually easy - but it depends on your pc really. Whether it's sata/ide, small case, room to fit a second drive etc.
 
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