Sometimes I forget how slow it was

ancient_mariner

ancient_mariner

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Toni
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Dug out my IR-converted D70 a couple of days ago, having not done any IR work for a while. It takes Compact Flash cards, so I don't have a card reader, and instead I just plug a USB lead into the camera for the transfer - about 12min to move around 700MB of images across.

I've got used to around 90MB/sec with SD cards, and they certainly aren't fast by modern standards, but this is soooo sslllooooowwwwwwwww.
 
Musicman said:
I'm guessing USB port of your D70 is the limiting factor here; it looks like it maxes out at 1.5 mbps - yikes!
Click to expand...

Yep, gen 1 USB I think. At least the sensor is only about 5 or 8mpx (images have that retro '1 lump or 2' look of a pointillist painting) so the files aren't huge.
 
6.1MP from memory.
 
Musicman said:
I'm guessing USB port of your D70 is the limiting factor here; it looks like it maxes out at 1.5 mbps - yikes!
Click to expand...
A few years ago (but not that long ago) I was part of a migration to move a set of databases from a very old database server to a new one. These databases were very important and it had taken 18 months of work to reach the point we were ready to migrate, the database was shut down and the databases themselves could be transferred to the new one. We'd found in testing that the servers were so old they struggled to keep the transfer going and would give a vague message about running out of resources however we'd found it we switched the node (there were two servers in high availability), restarted the server and switched back then immediately did the transfer, it would complete.

On the day of the production transfer, we went through this process and started transferring the database but I panicked when I got the message the transfer on the big database (around 200GB) was failing with the same problem despite the restart. Now you'd think just stick a USB drive into the server and copy it that way, nice, simple and fast but as you might guess where this is going...the server only had USB1.1 ports. If you think it's slow to transfer 700MB, 200GB would have been impossible taking around 300 hours if it could sustain the maximum transfer speed which aside from it taking way past the scheduled shutdown window for the transfer, bearing in mind the server wasn't managing to sustain a couple of hours transfer so 300 hours was not going to happen.

The database files themselves were on a SAN (so not on the local drive on the server) and the HA cluster meant the storage was attached to that virtual server so I couldn't even just boot the server into some other OS and try transferring the file over the network card. I thought I was completely stuck so tried the universal IT solution of rebooting the server and tried again which thankfully worked.

I do find modern camera speeds amazing. I had the D750 which was a great all round camera except the buffer was really crippled so it could only hold a small number of photos, when using burst mode I'd always be watching the remaining photos counting down so that I could take the next set of photos. I bought the Sony A9 which could manage a blistering 20fps along with a 240 shot buffer leading to the opposite problem of being too fast at times and taking too many photos. Then I switched to the Z8 which can write at full speed with no buffer needing even more cautious with overuse of the burst mode because it could produce so many files.
 
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