Lately I've been a little tweaked about how fast -- or slow -- my 1DSMKIII writes from the buffer to the flash media. I was confused because I was getting a faster write using a slower Transcend SDHC Class 6 8GB card than I was using my 16GB Ridata 233X card.
Well, after some research, I found out, obviously, that the controller in the camera and the controller in the flash media is usually the bottle neck, being that the two don't play nice with each other in some and many instances. Furthermore, this problem is compounded with both external and internal card readers--internal, in my experience, is the slowest of the bunch due to cheap controllers. Also making the problem worse is that Compact Flash cards are slower yet when transferring from media to computer than SDHC cards are. It's some sort of CF controller issue that external and internal readers don't deal with well.
I compared a "good' internal reader with an old SanDisk external reader. This opened my eyes. The internal reader bottle necked at 4.7MB/s regardless of which type of media I used. The SanDisk external allowed full speed of the SDHC at about 10-12MB/s and the CF card (the Ridata 233x) jumped from 4.5 to around 8.5, but still about 40% of what the card is capable. Of course this doesn't help in camera, but it does help when transferring the files to your hard drive.
To overcome this problem, Addonics and a few others, have developed a CF to SATA converter which is really just an ATA to SATA bridge, but at least the controller will allow 133MB/s transfer speeds. They come with a 2.5" hard drive enclosure so I can plug them directly into my SATA hard drive docking station.
What I'd really like to have is the same thing but with an SDHC option as well.
So my question is, does anyone know of such a device?"
Thanks again--
