PC Firewire 800

[rabates]

My D700 files take a long time to download. I am considering a Udma Firewire 800 reader. I understand that FW 800 is somewhat crippled by SP 2 & 3. Microsoft has a patch but it also requires a registry tweek. Then it will still only run at 400 speeds. I would also have to buy a PCIe FW 800 card for my desktop and a type 2 pcima  FW card for my laptop. After all the tweeking,patching and spending I still may not realize my goal of faster downloads. Any more elegant solutions then the one above? Would I be better off going to the dark.....I mean  white side and switch to Mac.

[Jeremy Payne]

My D700 files take a long time to download. I am considering a Udma Firewire 800 reader. I understand that FW 800 is somewhat crippled by SP 2 & 3. Microsoft has a patch but it also requires a registry tweek. Then it will still only run at 400 speeds. I would also have to buy a PCIe FW 800 card for my desktop and a type 2 pcima  FW card for my laptop. After all the tweeking,patching and spending I still may not realize my goal of faster downloads. Any more elegant solutions then the one above? Would I be better off going to the dark.....I mean  white side and switch to Mac.

I could be wrong ... but I think your disk write speed is the bottleneck, not the transport frequency ... in other words, I think FW 800 would be no faster than USB 2.0 for this application.

[nemophoto]

Actually, FW800 is a lot faster on a PC. I have two G-Tech 500GB Q-Drives which have four interfaces: USB, FW400, FW800 and eSATA. I was an eSATA fan, but with a new motherboard, had problems with the drives being recognized when I turned them on. Added a FW800 board and found I consistently had read speeds of 70-75MB/sec. My eSATA achieved 50-60MB/sec, while USB was down around 28MB/sec. (Actually, my new motherboard has a defect, so I only can achieve a max USB speed at the moment of 12MB/sec.) I run Vista Business (32-bit).

So to answer your question, until USB3 is fully implemented, you'll have much faster results with a FW800 reader and UDMA card.

Nemo