SanDisk ExpressCard Reader for CompactFlash Cards – Speed Tested Here, And It Is Fast

“Come to think about it, what you are holding is quite a rare thing.  I have not heard of a ExpressCard reader for CF cards,” said one photography friend of mine.  To recap, I have tested the new SanDisk Extreme Pro here.  I love what the new card can do.  That got some of my photography friends excited as well.  But the top question from the crowd was: Hypothetically speaking, if we had the 64GB SanDisk Extreme Pro card, how long would it take to download the photos?  On a USB 2.0 connection like mine, the answer is 3 hours.

When I am on my overseas holiday, I always back up my photos daily onto my old laptop (and I make another backup on another external hard disk).  Transferring photos via the USB 2.0 seems like a pain, at least to me.  Even as I delete off unwanted photos during the shooting session, I may still end up with 4GB worth of materials.  That is 12 minutes of photo download, from the memory card to my laptop, using my laptop’s precious battery power.  But that is only for a holiday trip.  I can imagine for the professional event or sport photographers, they would have shot a lot more photos a day, required to transfer a lot more photos a day into the computer for processing.  Any time saving for these professionals could mean a lot.  In fact, I once covered a media event.  And I ended up with tons of photos that evening.

So, just how fast is the SanDisk ExpressCard Reader?  To cut a long story short, by my testing, this reader reduces the download time by 70%.

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One day SanDisk called me and asked if I am interested to test out the new ExpressCard Reader for CF cards.  I said yes in a heartbeat, excited about the opportunity to touch and feel this loaned unit.  When the excitement subsided, there was one minor logistic challenge – I don’t have a laptop that has an ExpressCard slot!

Panic, and I began making contacts with my friends and asked if I could borrow their laptops for a timed experiment.  Interestingly, while not all laptops in this world has an ExpressCard slot, quite a few do – both Windows OS and Mac OS.  In fact more than I have anticipated.  So, a big thank you to my friends who have responded and especially those who are so keen to loan me their laptops for testing on something they have no idea what it is all about.  You guys rock!

Although my sister’s [pretty high end] Fujitsu laptop is about 2 years old, it does have an ExpressCard slot.  In fact, Fujitsu began shipping that technology since mid 2005.  I am not technologically inclined and hence, it took me a while to correctly install the necessary software (or driver) and got the test going (and to correctly find the slot!).  Remember, only install the driver from the CD provided once you attach your card reader into your laptop preferably with a CF card inserted. Your Windows OS may tell you that your card reader is ready to be used.  But in fact, the speed can be so slow that it is not usable (6 times slower than USB 2.0 in my case when I incorrectly installed the driver).

For my simple test, I use 40 real life photos in 14-bit RAW format.  That sums up to about 500MB worth of photos.  I preformed the test on both the new SanDisk Extreme Pro (90MB/s) as well as my old SanDisk Extreme IV (45MB/s).  The result is the same.  Upload of photos (i.e. write speed) via the card reader took 20 seconds.  Download of photos (i.e. read speed) took 26 seconds.  For comparison, download via USB 2.0 took 86 seconds.  To extrapolate, a 16GB worth of photos would take less than a quarter of an hour to download using this card reader.  That may seem long, but imagine the alternative option I am currently having (and how precious laptop battery power is).  If download time can be cut by 70%, that is awesome.

So who needs this?

Professional photographers or enthusiasts who have a laptop that supports ExpressCard, consider the time saving (and power saving for the laptop on battery), it is certainly a worthwhile investment.

Note: SanDisk proposes that I should use either a MacBook Pro with ExpressCard slot or Sony VAIO VGNCR220E for testing.  Unfortunately, I am unable to secure any of these two types of laptop at the time of testing.