What is wrong with Firewire

G4-Altivec · Nov 4, 2002

Can anybody tell me why my firewire transfers are slower than my USB transfers? I have tried it on two different cards using a single raw image. These are my results:

Standard SanDisk 128 - USB= 49 sec Firewire = 2 min 13 sec
24x Lexar 256 - USB= 36 sec Firewire = 1 min 05 sec

One of the things that swayed me to the S2 Pro over a Nikon D100 was that the Fuji had firewire. Is there something wrong with my camera? Is there something I am doing wrong? Has anybody else noticed this?

If this helps, one thing that I notice is that the orange status light glows only half as bright during firewire transfers. I sure hope I don’t have to send in my camera because other than this I love it.

Thanks in advance

David Bilodeau · Nov 4, 2002

Hi G4,

Use the AC adapter for your Laptop and the S2. Also update the FireWire device driver in your computer.

Regards,

David

Mike Flood · Nov 4, 2002

David Bilodeau said:
Hi G4,

Use the AC adapter for your Laptop and the S2. Also update the
FireWire device driver in your computer.

But if you are using CR123a batteries be sure to remove them before you attach the AC Adaptor.

I find that firewire downloading is so fast that I don't have to use the AC Adaptor. I just plug in the camera, download the images, then turn off the camera. Windows XP will allow that. SE and ME will not.
--
Mike Flood

peter · Nov 5, 2002

I have the S2 and mine downlaods at blazing speeds, I have a Toshiba laptop with xp, pent 4 512 ram 1.7gig proccesser, But I did have to buy the Belkin pci card thats the only one that would work for the shooting software.
Peter

grc · Nov 5, 2002

Hi,

I think my firewire download is slow.

How fast should it be downloading files?

Any help would be appreciated.

GRC

G4-Altivec said:
Can anybody tell me why my firewire transfers are slower than my
USB transfers? I have tried it on two different cards using a
single raw image. These are my results:

Standard SanDisk 128 - USB= 49 sec Firewire = 2 min 13 sec
24x Lexar 256 - USB= 36 sec Firewire = 1 min 05 sec

One of the things that swayed me to the S2 Pro over a Nikon D100
was that the Fuji had firewire. Is there something wrong with my
camera? Is there something I am doing wrong? Has anybody else
noticed this?

If this helps, one thing that I notice is that the orange status
light glows only half as bright during firewire transfers. I sure
hope I don’t have to send in my camera because other than this I
love it.

Thanks in advance

G4-Altivec · Nov 5, 2002

Thanks guys.

So from what I am gathering, Firewire should be way faster. Thats great news. Now I just have to figure out how to get it that way on my system.

The power adapter suggestion sounds like a good plan to save power but can the lack of AC power really slow down firewire. That also doesn't solve the problem if I'm on the road and I want to download pictures where no AC plug in is available. Does anyone know how much a Fuji AC adaptor costs?

It seems like the blazing speeds are on PC systems. I am running on Dual Ghz Mac and a titanium powerbook running OS X Jaguar. I would assume that the firewire drivers are up to date but maybe the Fuji needs a special driver or something. Does anyone with a Mac running OS X have blazing speeds also or do we have to wait for an updated driver.

Vlad63918 · Nov 5, 2002

I just compared USB and FireWire speed. 32 files took 5 minutes with USB and 2 minutes and 5 seconds with FireWire. A couple of months ago I tested Card Reader. It was much faster than S2 FireWire interface, but I don't remember exact time. Although with Card Reader it was much faster I do not use it being afraid to damage the slot for Micro Drive in my camera.
Friend of mine had this problem.
Vlad

grc said:
I think my firewire download is slow.

How fast should it be downloading files?

Any help would be appreciated.

GRC

G4-Altivec said:

Can anybody tell me why my firewire transfers are slower than my
USB transfers? I have tried it on two different cards using a
single raw image. These are my results:

Standard SanDisk 128 - USB= 49 sec Firewire = 2 min 13 sec
24x Lexar 256 - USB= 36 sec Firewire = 1 min 05 sec

One of the things that swayed me to the S2 Pro over a Nikon D100
was that the Fuji had firewire. Is there something wrong with my
camera? Is there something I am doing wrong? Has anybody else
noticed this?

If this helps, one thing that I notice is that the orange status
light glows only half as bright during firewire transfers. I sure
hope I don’t have to send in my camera because other than this I
love it.

Thanks in advance

Click to expand...

--
http://www.vchapran.com

Doug Jones · Nov 5, 2002

G4-Altivec said:
Thanks guys.
..........
It seems like the blazing speeds are on PC systems. I am running
on Dual Ghz Mac and a titanium powerbook running OS X Jaguar. I
would assume that the firewire drivers are up to date but maybe the
Fuji needs a special driver or something. Does anyone with a Mac
running OS X have blazing speeds also or do we have to wait for an
updated driver.

I use my firewire card reader rather than the S2 - because it is easier for me. I only have a "lowly" Pentium 2 333mhz PC with firewire and a firewire attached hard disk for photo storage. This means I am downloading over firewire then writing back over firewire to the hard disk - and they are daisy chained on the same wire too. My times are less than 1 second per 4.5Mb jpeg and less than 3 seconds per raw file. Blink and its done!!

I believe the firewire drivers will adjust down the working speed until there are no errors if the connection can't handle the higher speeds. I would suggest getting a top quality firewire cable and trying again.
--
Doug Jones
Canberra
http://www.panamagic.com.au

rjackb · Nov 5, 2002

I use my S2 with the Firewire cable plugged into the back of a G4 Powerbook running OS X Jaguar and it is around twice as fast as USB. Is your cable good quality? Are you plugged directly into your machine's Firewire port or through daisy chained devices or through a hub? How, exactly, do you download? With FinePix's Automatic Save feature? With iPhoto? With Image Capture? With Finder? Some other way?

Jack

G4-Altivec said:
Thanks guys.

So from what I am gathering, Firewire should be way faster. Thats
great news. Now I just have to figure out how to get it that way
on my system.

The power adapter suggestion sounds like a good plan to save power
but can the lack of AC power really slow down firewire. That also
doesn't solve the problem if I'm on the road and I want to download
pictures where no AC plug in is available. Does anyone know how
much a Fuji AC adaptor costs?

It seems like the blazing speeds are on PC systems. I am running
on Dual Ghz Mac and a titanium powerbook running OS X Jaguar. I
would assume that the firewire drivers are up to date but maybe the
Fuji needs a special driver or something. Does anyone with a Mac
running OS X have blazing speeds also or do we have to wait for an
updated driver.

G4-Altivec · Nov 5, 2002

So i guess I can rule out that its an OS-X issue. I thought that you guys might be right on track with the cable idea as I was using an old one that came with my dv camcorder, however, I just used the one that came with the S2 and I get the exact same slow times. I have the firewire cable plugged directly in the back of the G4 with no other peripherals attached. I am dragging the file from a finder window to my desktop using the finder. I've used firewire dv camcorders, Harddrives, and a scanner without any problems so I doubt its the computer. Its looking more and more like I have a problem with my camera. Everybody else seems to be flying and i can't even get on the runway.

If anybody has any idea of what I am doing wrong your help would be greatly appreciated.

rjackb said:
I use my S2 with the Firewire cable plugged into the back of a G4
Powerbook running OS X Jaguar and it is around twice as fast as
USB. Is your cable good quality? Are you plugged directly into
your machine's Firewire port or through daisy chained devices or
through a hub? How, exactly, do you download? With FinePix's
Automatic Save feature? With iPhoto? With Image Capture? With
Finder? Some other way?

Jack

Dioni · Nov 5, 2002

Vlad wrote:

Although with Card Reader it was much faster I do not use it being afraid to damage the slot for Micro Drive in my camera.

Hi Vlad,

Why do you think you could damage it? I use card readers all the time, but don't understand what it has to do with the camera slot.

Thx a lot,
Dioni

Mike Russell113930 · Nov 6, 2002

G4-Altivec said:
So i guess I can rule out that its an OS-X issue.

Everybody else seems to be flying and i

G4-Altivec said:
can't even get on the runway.

If anybody has any idea of what I am doing wrong your help would be
greatly appreciated.

Not just you. I do find firewire a bit quicker than USB (to a G4 Mac) but not fifty or so times faster which it should be. I've also heard the advice that it works faster with your camera connected to a mains adaptor but since I don't have one....

I guess what we need is a microdrive reader that'll run under OSX, and I don't think there is one yet.

Mike Russell

rjackb · Nov 6, 2002

There are several factors in Firewire speed. One would be the transfer speed of your flash memory (Compact Flash or SmartMedia) card or MicroDrive. I believe they typically run in the 1-8MB/sec range for reads (which seems incredibly slow to me for memory) while Firewire officially supports around 50MB/sec so the memory card is already limiting the speed by quite a bit. Secondly, there is the speed of the device's interface (the camera in this case). I have no idea what it will support but probably isn't terrribly fast though one would hope it's at least as fast as the flash memory. And, the activity on your computer is going to be a factor as well, e.g. if you have a lot of applications open and especially if the machine is busy. There are surely other factors as well. If you're not already running the OS X 10.2.1 update, I'd recommend it since it did fix some problems with Firewire devices.

Jack

mouseinthehouse said:
Not just you. I do find firewire a bit quicker than USB (to a G4
Mac) but not fifty or so times faster which it should be. I've also
heard the advice that it works faster with your camera connected to
a mains adaptor but since I don't have one....

I guess what we need is a microdrive reader that'll run under OSX,
and I don't think there is one yet.

Mike Russell

Radu Grozescu · Nov 6, 2002

Mike Russell113930 said:
Not just you. I do find firewire a bit quicker than USB (to a G4
Mac) but not fifty or so times faster which it should be.

I think the bottleneck is the card, not the Firewire. You shouldn't expect much more than 2MB/sec from the card so indeed about twice as USB.

Did you try to shoot directly into the computer (without saving to the card, but to the HDD). It may give you an idea about the camera - computer transfer speed.

Radu Grozescu
Corporate & Editorial Photography
http://www.RaduGrozescu.com

G4-Altivec · Nov 6, 2002

I myself wasn't expecting 50x USB but I was expecting firewire to be at least as fast as the camera can read from the card. My Lexar card say 2.4mb/sec so I'm thinking that firewire should be at least twice as fast than that of USB. My results are the opposite though. USB is about 3 times faster than my firewire.

Radu, How do you transfer directly to the camera without saving to the card?

Radu Grozescu said:
Member said:

Not just you. I do find firewire a bit quicker than USB (to a G4
Mac) but not fifty or so times faster which it should be.

Click to expand...

I think the bottleneck is the card, not the Firewire. You shouldn't
expect much more than 2MB/sec from the card so indeed about twice
as USB.

Did you try to shoot directly into the computer (without saving to
the card, but to the HDD). It may give you an idea about the camera

computer transfer speed.

Radu Grozescu
Corporate & Editorial Photography
http://www.RaduGrozescu.com

Radu Grozescu · Nov 6, 2002

G4-Altivec said:
How do you transfer directly to the camera without saving to
the card?

I quote from the Phil's review:

Camera Control (Auto acquire) mode turns the local computer into an external storage device for the camera. You shoot with the camera as you would normally, each shot is automatically saved back to the computer, a small thumbnail of the image is displayed along with detailed exposure information. All settings are made at the camera.

Radu Grozescu
Corporate & Editorial Photography
http://www.RaduGrozescu.com

JohnB23144 · Nov 6, 2002

G4-Altivec said:
Can anybody tell me why my firewire transfers are slower than my
USB transfers? I have tried it on two different cards using a
single raw image. These are my results:
Standard SanDisk 128 - USB= 49 sec Firewire = 2 min 13 sec
24x Lexar 256 - USB= 36 sec Firewire = 1 min 05 sec
One of the things that swayed me to the S2 Pro over a Nikon D100
was that the Fuji had firewire. Is there something wrong with my
camera? Is there something I am doing wrong? Has anybody else
noticed this?

My tests on a PC show S2 Firewire transfers to be faster than USB, but much slower than one would like: http://www.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1020&message=3094783
JohnB

Tuba Paul · Nov 6, 2002

Hi, Peter.
Would that be the Satellite 5105-S501, perchance?

peter cartier said:
I have the S2 and mine downlaods at blazing speeds, I have a
Toshiba laptop with xp, pent 4 512 ram 1.7gig proccesser, But I did
have to buy the Belkin pci card thats the only one that would work
for the shooting software.
Peter

Gerhard Witteveen · Nov 7, 2002

When using Mac OSX 10.2 (Jaguar in US) FW-download is very slow. Anyone a bright idea??

G4-Altivec said:
Can anybody tell me why my firewire transfers are slower than my
USB transfers? I have tried it on two different cards using a
single raw image. These are my results:

Standard SanDisk 128 - USB= 49 sec Firewire = 2 min 13 sec
24x Lexar 256 - USB= 36 sec Firewire = 1 min 05 sec

One of the things that swayed me to the S2 Pro over a Nikon D100
was that the Fuji had firewire. Is there something wrong with my
camera? Is there something I am doing wrong? Has anybody else
noticed this?

If this helps, one thing that I notice is that the orange status
light glows only half as bright during firewire transfers. I sure
hope I don’t have to send in my camera because other than this I
love it.

Thanks in advance

Mike Russell113930 · Nov 10, 2002

rjackb said:
There are several factors in Firewire speed. One would be the
transfer speed of your flash memory (Compact Flash or SmartMedia)
card or MicroDrive. I believe they typically run in the 1-8MB/sec
range for reads

Does anyone use a PMCIA adaptor for reading from a Microdrive to a Powerbook? Presumably there is less of a bottleneck there and the data transfers at the maximum read speed of the drive?

Mike Russell

What is wrong with Firewire

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