Not a Fair Fight

When you pit FireWire 800 against USB 2.0, it's just not a fair fight. FireWire wins hands down--even FireWire 400 beats USB 2.0. I recently got my hands on some new CompactFlash cards and a FireWire 800 CF card reader. So a friend and I decided to test just how much of a real world performance gain I had acquired. I was not expecting the results we got to be so lopsided.

We tested two cards and two readers in all four possible combinations. My friend's old card (Lexar 80x 4 GB CF card) and old reader (SanDisk USB 2.0 reader) against my new 8GB SanDisk Extreme IV CF card and a new Lexar FireWire 800 reader. We copied 3.18 GB of data in a Finder copy.  The computer was a Mac Pro 2x3.2GHz, Quad Core Intel Xeon with 6 GB of RAM, running Leopard.

• USB reader with old card: 5:33
• USB reader with new card: 3:05
• FireWire reader with old card: 4:38
• FireWire reader with new card: 1:19

What I took away from this unscientific test, it that both faster cards and faster readers help, but combining the two was huge. We took over 4 minutes off of a 5:33 transfer by using the faster card and reader. Remember that the 8 GB card is not even half full. BTW, Rob Galbraith has great info on cards and readers.

Comments

[Greg Jewett]

That is truely amazing. One thing to note is that some USB Card readers are faster than others I found -- and the only difference I found was the supporting USB chipset and the manufacturers support chipset. I have two different USB card readers, one really old, and it is slow (molasses going uphill on a cold day) and a newer model that is at least 2-3x faster.

Your experiences may vary.

[Craig K Gowens]

Having a UDMA "Ultra Direct Memory Access" card (all newer Extreme IV cards are UDMA) with a UDMA capable reader significantly improves read/write speeds. This test you and Tomás did demonstrates that nicely. Looks like I definitely need to upgrade all my cards to (just have one now) at the very least and possibly replace Hoodman RAW USB 2.0 UDMA card reader if a FW800 reader....once I can find a firewire hub that I like for my MacBook Pro which would be necessary since I offload my images directly to a firewire 800 drive.