The PCMCIA in my laptop is considerably slower than the firewire
connection. I'm sure theoretically that PCMCIA is faster than the
card speed, but it looks like maybe laptops have an inherent speed
cap that is much lower.
Not inherent, but most laptops have much slower hard discs than
most desktops (2.5" 4200rpm vs 3.5" 7200rpm in my case,
plus differences in cache sizes).
As already stated, the interfaces are faster than the CF cards:
they are also faster than destination drives. I have a week-old
laptop, and on that copying 64Mb of images across its disc took 17
seconds. Older machines can be much slower (especially on battery
power).
The PCMCIA adapter price seems high to me. My desktop has
one because it used to have a wireless network adapter (which
is a PCMCIA card) and that was 10GBP ($14) extra. It works
with my microdrives and adapters.
Greg,
I have and use both. On my laptop I use the PCMCIA slot with my
microdrives...only when travelling!. I can assure you that the
Firewire reader (Lexar) on my desktop is considerably faster.
When I had PCMCIA slots in my desktop they were faster then the
PCMCIA slots in my laptop.
Bill
Does anyone have first hand knowledge as to which of these is
faster at transfering images from a microdrive to your hard drive?
I have USB 2.0 but there are no true USB 2.0 readers yet.
I had PCMCIA PC slots in my last computer but my new MB doesn't
have any ISA slots so I'm stuck with a USB 1.1 reader for now.
There is a PCI version of the PCMCIA PC slots available that costs
about $80. I'd perfer the PCMCIA over firewire unless the firewire
is much faster.
--
D60. 28-135 IS, 100 macro, Sigma 15-30
