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Home brew Thunderbolt Compact Flash card reader


Tyler Faison

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  • 2 weeks later...

Why not just use Apple's Thunderbolt to FW800 adapter with a good FW800 CF reader?

 

Mark O.

 

Short answer...because this is faster. If you do that, why not just use the FW800 reader by itself? Your speeds would be capped at FW800 speeds instead of SATA speeds. Of course everything depends on the CF card you have and if you're able to utilize the high read speeds, but I'd gladly shave off every second that I can since I'm doing a CF dump pretty much every day of my life. It helps me get home/to my room that much sooner.

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Thats awesome Tyler.  The show i'm on got me Lacie rugged Thunderbolt drives for offload.  Im just popping the SD card from the 664 into my Macbook Pro and copying right over.  Super fast, very little time spent offloading at end of day.

 

I am a big believer in the 664 making reality gigs so much easier.  Just a more intuitive machine.  

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Thanks for this writeup.

 

I just bought the SYBA CF card reader to use USB - standalone, there's some caveats people should be aware of.

First off, it's a CF to SATA bridge, then a SATA to USB bridge.   This means that although throughput is good (I got 25MB/sec read/ 15MB/sec write on my cards), access time is a little impacted over USB.

Also, and more of a caveat - It shows up as a Fixed Hard Drive in the OS, not a removable USB media.

This caused a gotcha for me when I formatted a CF using this adapter - it formatted without the "removable media" data set correctly, so my other devices also treated it differently.

 

Tom (TASCAM).

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Short answer...because this is faster. If you do that, why not just use the FW800 reader by itself? Your speeds would be capped at FW800 speeds instead of SATA speeds. Of course everything depends on the CF card you have and if you're able to utilize the high read speeds, but I'd gladly shave off every second that I can since I'm doing a CF dump pretty much every day of my life. It helps me get home/to my room that much sooner.

My Retina MacBook Pro doesn't have firewire of any kind, so I have to use an adapter. I have a Sandisk Extreme FW800 CF card reader that is very fast. I feel like the limitation is in the cards.

 

What kind of read speeds do you get with your setup?

 

Mark O.

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