I have an Inspiron 6000 (like anyone on here uses anything but a dell, bought at a great deal...). It's got the built in SD slot plus a pcmcia slot. Since I usually use a digital Rebel w/ CF, I picked up a sandisk pcmcia-CF adapter card. Importing pics into picasa from the CF it usually says it's doing around 900-950k/sec. All my CF cards are high speed (Lexar Professional 80x or Sandisk Ultra II). Using a SD card (NOT high speed one) from a friends cam in the slot, it was doing several megs a sec. Quite the difference! I was just wondering - is the adapter card I'm using limiting me (is there a faster one available), or is that the limit of the interface? I doubt so, since you can get usb2 and FW pcmcia cards. On the desktop using a USB2 card reader, the same CF cards read into picasa at several megs a sec, so it's not the cards.

I think USB 2.0 and firewire is faster than pcmcia. Not 100% sure but pretty sure.

[/QUOTE]like anyone on here uses anything but a dell[QUOTE]



HP XW4000 Workstation.

I have dells but still do have an emachines up and running well too

I assume with available wireless PCMCIA cards being up to 108Mbps (theoretical limit, I guess), that could mean up to 10MB/sec? I don't know if that's actually attainable, but with wireless g, even 20Mbps would mean 2MB/sec...but I don't know anybody with wireless g pcmcia cards, so can't say for sure.

BTW, I use a Dell as a test system. An outlet system that I got at a really good price. My main computer is self built and I'm always putzing around with it. I forget what I have in it now

So, the pcmcia interface even at its slowest should be able to do better than 900k/s off the CF card. I wonder if there's faster adapters out there or if they're all like this.

For times when speed is important, I can just toss a usb reader in the bag. It's nice having the adapter though - less to haul around and it's completely internal. Just slow

Oh, and I have currently 4 dells at the house. The laptop, 2 desktops (both 400sc machines upgraded - one is 2.2 P4, gig ram, 9800 pro gaming machine, one is 3.0HTP4, 2 gig ram, 1 TB HD space (off a hardware raid 5 card) video editing machine), and a 2400 refurb that's running 3 infrared webcams for watching the babies' rooms (so we can see them at night if they fuss without going in and waking them up more).

Then my wife has a homebuilt computer running a duron 1800, gig ram, 2x 60 HD. Got a athlonxp 1.8 homebuilt htpc, soon to be replaced by a smaller one built in an antec aria case with a similar speed proc. The old full size htpc will have its guts moved into a huge server case (it's on casters and has 13 5.25 bays!) to be a file server for feeding the htpc and backing up our other machines. It'll have around a TB in it

You go boy!

Now I don't feel so bad for having three desktops and a notebook for two people!

Yup. Wife's got a computer, I've got 3 (2 desktop and laptop), got a server and htpc, and then the kids (11 month old and one in the oven) have a computer

My office looks like a computer salvage yard.

It also depends on whether the CF card is being accessed in CF or ATA mode; ATA is usually faster. I believe USB 2.0 card readers show up to the system as a generic mass storage device and then use ATA mode internally... And for a Lexar 80X, a firewire reader beats everything for speed (I get around 9-10 mbytes/sec read). The cards max was around 12 mbytes/sec or so in a CF test somewhere.

My Lexar 80x failed catastrophically about a month ago -- in a Nikon CP4500, just died. Couldn't access in CF mode on any operating system, neither through an ATA adapter. Lexar said some data is still on there, they will recover it and send a replacement.

Found a Canon CF-pcmcia adaptor lying around in an old multifunction printer (instead of card slots, it had a pcmcia slot and came with the cf adaptor). Tried using it to copy pics to the laptop - got the same speeds, right around 900k. Guess that's all I'm gonna get via that route.

Sheesh, all these home computers... anyone want to send me a couple? Least now I don't feel bad about having 5 computers in my office at work.