When I upgraded to the Lexar Professional USB 3.0 reader, from a USB 2.0 reader, the transfer speed of reading the files to the computer went from about 20Mb/s to about 40 Mb/s using the Sandisk Extreme Pro UDMA 6, 90Mb/s. When I used the Lexar 1000x UDMA 7 card, the speed went up to 120 Mb/s. This is 3 times faster than the Sandisk and a huge difference when downloading a cardful of 45 Mb size files.

How long ago did you upgrade?

I got the usb 3 reader about a month ago, and the lexar 1000 card just a couple of days ago.

The reason I asked is because when I got mine it had old firmware.
Some cards would read fast and some slow. After I upgraded firmware all cards are now fast.

Do you mean the card reader's firmware?

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Yes.

Nice! I just got a replacement for my internal card reader that supports USB 3.0, but haven't installed it yet. Gotta get that done soon. Wondering how fast it's going to be with my Lexar 600x SD card.

Alex
http://www.yermakov.net

>Nice! I just got a replacement for my internal card reader
>that supports USB 3.0, but haven't installed it yet. Gotta get
>that done soon. Wondering how fast it's going to be with my
>Lexar 600x SD card.

Did your PC have internal USB 3, or did the new reader come with a card? What brand is it?

AviSys

Yes, the PC supports USB3 and I've got internal connections for that. New reader wouldn't be of much use without that It's SilverStone, quite a decent parts maker.

Alex
http://www.yermakov.net

I also upgraded to USB 3.0 for card reader and hard disks. The speed increase makes life so much easier. I also quit converting to DNG format while transfer from CF card to computer. What a waste of time that was!

You have to be sure and upgrade the entire load path or you do not get the highest transfer speeds.

Larry Jordan

D800E, 14-24, 50, 24-70, 70-180 Micro, 70-200, 80-400mm AF-S

Website:
http://larryjordan.smugmug.com/

I actually don't worry about external drives to be very fast - I've got a home network with a file server which keeps the data. And I don't really care if backups to external drives take few hours instead of one - it's all done automatically and at night.

But for an average user - yes, upgrading all the components to be faster, as you suggest, is essential if they want to waste less time.

Alex
http://www.yermakov.net

I bought a DLock FW 800 reader and it takes over four hours to download a 16 GB card full of pics from the D800. That seems ridiculous! USB2 is faster on my system (MacPro..)
D

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Lexar reader USB 3.0 reading from Topram 600x 64gb cards doing it 2 RAW files per second or about 11 minutes for 1300 files. If files are smaller like from Canon 7d or 5D2 it will do 4 RAW files per second.

This is from another post on memory speed tests. The Fuji and Lexar SD speeds are for a MacBook Pro with a builtin SD reader, it has USB 3 ports. The Transcend Card Reader is a USB 3 type.

Below are some results from the Black Magic program available from Apple.

All are W/R MB/s speeds from Black Magic Speed Test:

MacBook Pro Retina SSD 415/450
LaCie 4TB RAID 0 Thunderbolt 322/390
Hitachi 7200rpm USB3, USB3 port 53/114
Hitachi 7200rpm USB3, USB2 port 14/33
USB Memory Stick USB3 port 5/21
Fuji SDHC-10 19/23
Lexar SDHC-10 600X 39/80
Lexar CF UDMA 7 1000X 64/115 (Using Transcend USB3 reader)