Reading mode: Light Dark

WARNING: Lexar Pro UDMA Fire Wire 800 CF Card Reader

Go to last post
W

Wanchese

Senior Member
Messages
2,568
Solutions
1
Reaction score
157
Location
Malibu, Ca / Nags Head, US
Bought two Lexar Pro UDMA Fire Wire 800 CF Card Reader to daisy chain and import two cards simultaneously into LR 2.5. It took 40 minutes to off load a San Disk Extreme III 8 gig card, little to no improvement over my old USB 2.0 card reader. My PC recognized two readers, not one as I expected if the daisy chaining was going to work. The second reader over stated the number of shots on it's card by 340 and wouldn't permit any import. I ejected that card reader and tried the other one by itself. It took ten imutes to download 35 images, then my LR screen started going HAYWIRE!

Why the warning? I did the 24/7 live chat tech support thang with Lexar. They said DO NOT DAISY CHAIN OR STACK THE READERS AS IT CAN CORRUPT THE DATA. She might have even said WILL corrupt, but I am not going to swear on it.

--
You Will Never Walk Alone
 
Wanchese said:
Bought two Lexar Pro UDMA Fire Wire 800 CF Card Reader to daisy chain and import two cards simultaneously into LR 2.5. It took 40 minutes to off load a San Disk Extreme III 8 gig card, little to no improvement over my old USB 2.0 card reader. My PC recognized two readers, not one as I expected if the daisy chaining was going to work. The second reader over stated the number of shots on it's card by 340 and wouldn't permit any import. I ejected that card reader and tried the other one by itself. It took ten imutes to download 35 images, then my LR screen started going HAYWIRE!

Why the warning? I did the 24/7 live chat tech support thang with Lexar. They said DO NOT DAISY CHAIN OR STACK THE READERS AS IT CAN CORRUPT THE DATA. She might have even said WILL corrupt, but I am not going to swear on it.

--
You Will Never Walk Alone
Click to expand...
 
I think you have a major system problem going on...

8GB Lexar 300x UDMA Card and Lexar FW800 Reader... and I transfer 8GB about 830 D3 RAW files in about 3m 30sec...

And the FW800 readers are made to be stacked up to 4...
I think you need to check your system...

PowerMac G5 1.8GHz w/ 4GB RAM...
--
Rich
Nikon D3
NAPP Member and SportsShooter.com Member
http://www.sportsshooter.com/richfavinger/
 
I think the OP desperately needs to look at his system and check his drivers. Something is seriously amiss here, both with the USB 2 and the FW timings. Looks like he's getting sub-USB 1 speeds there!

SB
 
A FW 800 card reader has a potential speed of 800 megabits/second or 100 megabytes/second if plugged into a FW 800 port. If plugged into a FW 400 port, its potential speed is reduced to 400 megabits/second or 50 megabytes/second. USB 2.0 has a potential speed of 480 megabits/second or 60 megabytes/second.

The Sandisk Extreme III card has a read/write speed of 30 megabytes per second and so would be the limiting factor for data transfer regardless of whether connected by FW 800, FW 400, or USB 2.0. (I'm assuming the hard disc in your computer can do better than 30 megabytes/second or it will be the limiting factor). If you went from a USB 2.0 card reader to the Firewire readers expecting a speed increase, it was never going to happen with the Extreme III cards. Even the Extreme IV cards are limited to 40 megabytes/second.

Having said that 40 minutes for 8 gigabytes of data is an indication of sick system. Roughly speaking, 8 gigabytes at 30 megabytes/second equals approx 265 seconds (about four and a half minutes).

Daisy-chained Firewire devices will always mount as separate devices just as yours did. Daisy-chaining Firewire devices does not cause data corruption. I do it often. It sounds like one or both of your cards might have corrupt directories - when did you last format the cards in your camera? Also, when did you last perform maintenance (directory check, virus check, etc) on your computer's hard disc? Directory problems can cause data corruption and slow down data transfer.
--
Ken AD
 
Thanks to all who replied to my warning with suggestions about my system. I am running a Dell workstaion with dual quad core Xeon processors, 8 GB of RAM and an overkill viedo card. The OS is Win 7 Pro 64bit wih four internal hard drives, two 10,000 rpm units in a Raid 0 and two 7,500rpm drives in a Raid 1 config. The system was just wiped clean for the new OS install and all software added fresh. I run virus scans nightly, mirror my work drive nightly and backup my LR2 catalog on an external drive. Nightly. So I reckon my PC is capable of supporting a card reader.

Thanks for the facts on my Series III card, I can see how it is a bottleneck. But with regards to what the tech at Lexar told me about stacking or daisy chaining their Firewire 800 UDMA CF card reader, I was repeating exactly what I was told by the tech support rep.

I had posted a question last week to see if anyone had successfully used a strack of these readers to import multiple cards into LR simultaneously. No one responded, so I am guesssing either I am justly hated and shunned on these pages, or no one had any experience.

I now can report....daisy chaining them does not as advertised. You can not put two readers together, load in cards, and expect them to load into LR. I took today's images and tried a sinfgle reader, and this time it took 25 mins to offload 731 iRAW files from and 8 gig series III card.

Do what you will with your systems, but on my system, with my software, these card readers do njot daisy chaineffectively.

--
You Will Never Walk Alone
 
Wow, that is some system.

I don't have the Lexar FW 800 card readers that you have, but I have one Lexar FW 400 card reader and a Sandisk 4GB Extreme III card (which has a capacity of 3.7 GB formatted). Just now, I did a real-world test as follows. I copied a folder containing 3.6 GB of JPEGs (1400 files in about 20 folders) to the card - took 5m 30sec. Copied the same folder back to the hard drive - took 5m 30sec. That was using my MacBook with FW 400 port and internal Patriot solid state drive. In other words, the card reader with car installed was acting merely as an external Firewire hard drive and the operating system did the file copy.

I don't know what "importing into Lightroom" entails. It would be interesting if you could time a similar test to mine doing just a straight file copy to your hard drive with Lightroom not running.

Lexar's website clearly states that their FW 800 card readers can be daisy-chained (up to 4) allowing concurrent downloads. So the right hand is saying one thing and the left hand something else. I suggest trying the file copy described above first with just one card reader attached, then with both (again, with Lightroom not running).

If you can't get the daisy-chained units to work at the operating system level, then I would contact Lexar again and demand an explanation. If the test does work satisfactorily, it would indicate that the problem lies with Lightroom.
--
Regards
Ken
 
Some us actually take photos with a D3, which means we need to know about issues with getting those photos from the camera to the computer.

It's certainly more relevant than talking about Leica M lenses in the Nikon SLR lens forum as you did a few days ago.

Pot-kettle-black

Anthony
Paul Guba said:
This has to do with Nikon D3-D1 how? Wrong forum.
--
Enjoy the Day

Paul Guba New Jersey Photographer
http://www.gubavision.com
Click to expand...
--
check out my blog at http://anthonyonphotography.blogspot.com
 
Wanchese said:
Bought two Lexar Pro UDMA Fire Wire 800 CF Card Reader to daisy chain and import two cards simultaneously into LR 2.5. It took 40 minutes to off load a San Disk Extreme III 8 gig card, little to no improvement over my old USB 2.0 card reader. My PC recognized two readers, not one as I expected if the daisy chaining was going to work. The second reader over stated the number of shots on it's card by 340 and wouldn't permit any import. I ejected that card reader and tried the other one by itself. It took ten imutes to download 35 images, then my LR screen started going HAYWIRE!

Why the warning? I did the 24/7 live chat tech support thang with Lexar. They said DO NOT DAISY CHAIN OR STACK THE READERS AS IT CAN CORRUPT THE DATA. She might have even said WILL corrupt, but I am not going to swear on it.

--
You Will Never Walk Alone
Click to expand...
Ditch the stinky PC!
 
It has to do with this forum beccause I shoot with the D700 and prefer to warn my fellow Nikonians first.
--
You Will Never Walk Alone
 
Have you tried a direct copy from your FW800 reader card to a simple FOLDER on the system and time it? Perhaps your LR import is taking into account the rendering of previews, not the simple dumping of cards.

I've never used LR to direct import from a card. I dump to a folder, then import to LR; as the file stay ware I put them any way...

With that beast of a system, you have major issues that should not be. As stated from the Lexar web site the PROFESSIONAL READER is designed to be stacked up to 4 to allow multiple imports.
--
Rich
Nikon D3
NAPP Member and SportsShooter.com Member
http://www.sportsshooter.com/richfavinger/
 
Have a similar setup with Win7 64-bit, and also suffered from incredibly slow performance with the Lexar reader right after the upgrade to Win7.

Here's a possible fix:
  • In device manager, right-click on the 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller
  • Choose Update Driver Software
  • Choose "Browse my Computer for driver software"
  • Choose "Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer". A list pops up that shows three entries:
OHCI-compliant 1394 Host controller
OHCI-compliant 1394 Host controller (legacy)
OHCI-compliant Texas Instruments 1394-Host controller
  • From these three select 'OHCI-compliant 1394 Host controller (legacy)'
That fixed the performance issue for me.

Geoff
 
Thanks Geoff...the driver was old and is now updated. I hope that helps with the Lexar and maybe...just maybe...my Drobo external drive as well. Thanks for the tip.
--
You Will Never Walk Alone
 
WOW...seemed I didn't get the newest Unibrain driver. I had a 5.21 and the techs at Drobo steered me to the 5.63... what a freakin' difference! The auto search didn't work, so i had to go the unibrain website to download. If the Lexar card's performance increase is close the Drobo's, I will be very happy.
--
You Will Never Walk Alone
 
Awesome Thanks Geoff...

I have an awesome computer system, and a lexar FW800 card reader but I was only getting a transfer speed of 4mb a sec.....itr had me baffled, ( im not a really savvy computer tech..lol) I did what you said with the host controller and instantly got 40+ mb a second..... Thanks for the info mate!!! Just dumped a 8 gig card in a min or two
Justin
chuirox said:
Have a similar setup with Win7 64-bit, and also suffered from incredibly slow performance with the Lexar reader right after the upgrade to Win7.

Here's a possible fix:
  • In device manager, right-click on the 1394 OHCI Compliant Host Controller
  • Choose Update Driver Software
  • Choose "Browse my Computer for driver software"
  • Choose "Let me pick from a list of device drivers on my computer". A list pops up that shows three entries:
OHCI-compliant 1394 Host controller
OHCI-compliant 1394 Host controller (legacy)
OHCI-compliant Texas Instruments 1394-Host controller
  • From these three select 'OHCI-compliant 1394 Host controller (legacy)'
That fixed the performance issue for me.

Geoff
Click to expand...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Keyboard shortcuts

f
Forum
m
My threads
Mobile site
About
Editorial content
Cameras & Lenses
Community
All content, design, and layout are Copyright © 1998–2025 Digital Photography Review All Rights Reserved.
Reproduction in whole or part in any form or medium without specific written permission is prohibited.
When you use DPReview links to buy products, the site may earn a commission.
©GPS Media - Guides, Products, Services.
Back
Top