Tea
Storage? I am Storage!
Some time ago, on Pradeep's suggestion, I orderd a Delkin Cardbus PCMCIA to Compact Flash adaptor. Here I report on it.
The Delkin adaptor. Underneath is an old style PCMCIA adaptor.
There are many ways of downloading images from a digital camera. The most common is to use a USB cable and connect the camera directly to the computer. This, however, is clumsy, means yet more messy cables, ties up the camera during the download, and can be a problem with battery drain on the camera too. Only the best cameras offer fair-dinkum USB2 transfer rates - you'd be surprised just how many cameras use a slug-like USB 1 or 1.1 interface, even now. If you have a laptop, you are probably struggling to find a spare USB port too. Finally, many cameras - notably the crap that Kodak habitually inflicts on the market but also some otherwise excellent high-end units like the Canon 20D - do not configure themselves as a drive letter in the proper way but insist that you use some pox-ridden Picture Transfer for Idiots software.
The other very common method uses an external USB 2 card reader. This is fast (as long as you have a USB 2 reader, not USB 1), but still creates extra cable mess, and most USB readers litter your system with 4 or 6 useless extra drive letters.
If you have a laptop, there is a much neater way: a PCMCIA card reader. This little thing sits in your PCMCIA slot, requires no cables at all, nor any power source, and just works. Plug the Compact Flash card into the reader, transfer the pictures. End of story.
(By the way, if you are not using Compact Flash, but instead bought a camera which supports one of those pox-ridden other non-standards as its storage method, then I am slightly sorry for you. Only slightly - you have a self-inflicted injury so don't come bleating to me about it.)
Compact Flash, very sensibly, was designed from the ground up to use the PCMCIA protocols, so the device is simplicity itself: no driver software, no electronics, it's just a mechanical adaptor that joins your CF card up to your PCMCIA slot. In a world where things get ever more complex and ever more trouble-prone, simple is good.
In short, PCMCIA is damn-near perfect. Alas, it is S L O W.
The idea of a Cardbus adaptor rather than a traditional PCMCIA unit is that it can use DMA instead of PIO. PIO transfers are very slow by today's standards and, worse, have very high CPU utilisation. So, in theory, Delkin's Cardbus DMA-capable adaptor should be a certain winner.
Supply isn't easy. None of the regular PC accessory wholesalers carry the Delkin gear, nor can they source it on request. Eventually I was reduced to buying one at retail, over the web from a Sydney-based company that I forget the name of already but which provided very fast service and I'd be happy to deal with again. (I have their details at the office and can provide them on request.)
Cost was about $AU80 I think. (Hey - it was Tannin's money - why should I care about the cost?) Compare this with a PCMCIA adaptor that you can pick up almost anywhere for less than $20.
Speed is everything it's cracked up to be. Where a PCMCIA adaptor takes maybe 6 or 8 minutes to empty a 512MB flash card, the Delkin does it in something like 1 or two minutes. (I haven't timed either one - no point, the Delkin is so much faster that there is no point. Call it 5 or 6 times faster at a rough guess - that's lots!.
The other big difference is that, being a DMA device, the computer remains usable while you are doing a transfer. With the PCMCIA transfers, the system slows to a crawl of the same general class as a Hewlett-Packard Celeron 433 with 64MB RAM running Windows XP with the eye-candy on. In the field, it's worse, as you are often running off batteries and have switched the Pentium M down to low speed to save on juice.
So far, the Delkin sounds like a clear winner. Actually, it's crap, and I can't recommend one to you.
The performance and CPU utilisation is great, but the detail design is really, really bad. For starters, you couldn't unplug the device without rebooting the computer! That alone made it useless. I have three cameras and about 6 flash cards and I need to read most of them most days. Rebooting five times just to load my flash cards is not on. If you just pull the card out, Windows complains and tells you to use the eject utility. If you do use the eject utility, that works fine, but when you insert the second CF card, Windows doesn't recognise it! (Unless you reboot.) Hopeless.
Secondly, the mechanical design is terrible. It's almost impossible to insert a flash card without taking the Delkin right out of the computer, and difficult to insert one when it is out. Look at the picture above: see the little cheap PCMCIA thing in the background? With that one (or any of the many others like it) you just slip the flash card in and it slots into place. With the Delkin, there are five different ways the flash card can slot in, and only one of them is correct. It's quite difficult to get the card lined up with the little rails. (Contrast this with the non-name product, where you can't get it in wrong if you try.) The upshot is that you have to pull the Delkin right out of the system, and carefully line the CF card up with it (using both hands), then carefully fiddle about getting the Delkin device lined up with and inserted into the PCMCIA socket. All the while, you are buggerising about trying to hold your camera between your teeth and not drop the other flash card in the mud. In a word, it is crap.
For the first three months of its life, my Delkin card was consigned straight to the junk box, saved for emergency use (such as an elephant stomping on my $15 no-name PCMCIA adaptor).
But then I bought the 20D, which an fill up a a 2GB flash card in less than five minutes. (Awesome camera!) Faced with the possibility of needing the best part of an hour to unload my flash cards each day, more in hope than expectation, I tried Delkin's web site for a new driver, just in case they had fixed the terminally broken pile of pox driving software the card ships with. Yup, thre was a new driver. But after you download it and run it, it unzips itself invisibly to a folder and doesn't tell you where the folder is located! I thought the EXE was corrupt after I'd run oit the first four times so I downloaded it again. Same. Eventually I took a guess at what one of the contained driver files might be called and tracked the folder down using a global search function. I absolutely defy any non-computer expert to install that driver without calling tech support for help. (If Delkin has tech support, that is, they can't do anything else much right.)
But after all that, to my astonishment, the new driver actually works. You can remove the card and replace it with another one without rebooting your system.
Will I use the Delkin now? I don't think I have a lot of choice anymore. The sheer amount of data I have to transfer has gone beyond what I can sensibly do with the little PCMCIA card. But I'll curse the damn thing every time I have to buggerise about swapping flash cards in it.
Would I buy another one?
No way.
Yes, buy a Cardbus CF adaptor. No, don't buy a Delkin.
Find another brand - any other brand would have to be better.
The Delkin adaptor. Underneath is an old style PCMCIA adaptor.
There are many ways of downloading images from a digital camera. The most common is to use a USB cable and connect the camera directly to the computer. This, however, is clumsy, means yet more messy cables, ties up the camera during the download, and can be a problem with battery drain on the camera too. Only the best cameras offer fair-dinkum USB2 transfer rates - you'd be surprised just how many cameras use a slug-like USB 1 or 1.1 interface, even now. If you have a laptop, you are probably struggling to find a spare USB port too. Finally, many cameras - notably the crap that Kodak habitually inflicts on the market but also some otherwise excellent high-end units like the Canon 20D - do not configure themselves as a drive letter in the proper way but insist that you use some pox-ridden Picture Transfer for Idiots software.
The other very common method uses an external USB 2 card reader. This is fast (as long as you have a USB 2 reader, not USB 1), but still creates extra cable mess, and most USB readers litter your system with 4 or 6 useless extra drive letters.
If you have a laptop, there is a much neater way: a PCMCIA card reader. This little thing sits in your PCMCIA slot, requires no cables at all, nor any power source, and just works. Plug the Compact Flash card into the reader, transfer the pictures. End of story.
(By the way, if you are not using Compact Flash, but instead bought a camera which supports one of those pox-ridden other non-standards as its storage method, then I am slightly sorry for you. Only slightly - you have a self-inflicted injury so don't come bleating to me about it.)
Compact Flash, very sensibly, was designed from the ground up to use the PCMCIA protocols, so the device is simplicity itself: no driver software, no electronics, it's just a mechanical adaptor that joins your CF card up to your PCMCIA slot. In a world where things get ever more complex and ever more trouble-prone, simple is good.
In short, PCMCIA is damn-near perfect. Alas, it is S L O W.
The idea of a Cardbus adaptor rather than a traditional PCMCIA unit is that it can use DMA instead of PIO. PIO transfers are very slow by today's standards and, worse, have very high CPU utilisation. So, in theory, Delkin's Cardbus DMA-capable adaptor should be a certain winner.
Supply isn't easy. None of the regular PC accessory wholesalers carry the Delkin gear, nor can they source it on request. Eventually I was reduced to buying one at retail, over the web from a Sydney-based company that I forget the name of already but which provided very fast service and I'd be happy to deal with again. (I have their details at the office and can provide them on request.)
Cost was about $AU80 I think. (Hey - it was Tannin's money - why should I care about the cost?) Compare this with a PCMCIA adaptor that you can pick up almost anywhere for less than $20.
Speed is everything it's cracked up to be. Where a PCMCIA adaptor takes maybe 6 or 8 minutes to empty a 512MB flash card, the Delkin does it in something like 1 or two minutes. (I haven't timed either one - no point, the Delkin is so much faster that there is no point. Call it 5 or 6 times faster at a rough guess - that's lots!.
The other big difference is that, being a DMA device, the computer remains usable while you are doing a transfer. With the PCMCIA transfers, the system slows to a crawl of the same general class as a Hewlett-Packard Celeron 433 with 64MB RAM running Windows XP with the eye-candy on. In the field, it's worse, as you are often running off batteries and have switched the Pentium M down to low speed to save on juice.
So far, the Delkin sounds like a clear winner. Actually, it's crap, and I can't recommend one to you.
The performance and CPU utilisation is great, but the detail design is really, really bad. For starters, you couldn't unplug the device without rebooting the computer! That alone made it useless. I have three cameras and about 6 flash cards and I need to read most of them most days. Rebooting five times just to load my flash cards is not on. If you just pull the card out, Windows complains and tells you to use the eject utility. If you do use the eject utility, that works fine, but when you insert the second CF card, Windows doesn't recognise it! (Unless you reboot.) Hopeless.
Secondly, the mechanical design is terrible. It's almost impossible to insert a flash card without taking the Delkin right out of the computer, and difficult to insert one when it is out. Look at the picture above: see the little cheap PCMCIA thing in the background? With that one (or any of the many others like it) you just slip the flash card in and it slots into place. With the Delkin, there are five different ways the flash card can slot in, and only one of them is correct. It's quite difficult to get the card lined up with the little rails. (Contrast this with the non-name product, where you can't get it in wrong if you try.) The upshot is that you have to pull the Delkin right out of the system, and carefully line the CF card up with it (using both hands), then carefully fiddle about getting the Delkin device lined up with and inserted into the PCMCIA socket. All the while, you are buggerising about trying to hold your camera between your teeth and not drop the other flash card in the mud. In a word, it is crap.
For the first three months of its life, my Delkin card was consigned straight to the junk box, saved for emergency use (such as an elephant stomping on my $15 no-name PCMCIA adaptor).
But then I bought the 20D, which an fill up a a 2GB flash card in less than five minutes. (Awesome camera!) Faced with the possibility of needing the best part of an hour to unload my flash cards each day, more in hope than expectation, I tried Delkin's web site for a new driver, just in case they had fixed the terminally broken pile of pox driving software the card ships with. Yup, thre was a new driver. But after you download it and run it, it unzips itself invisibly to a folder and doesn't tell you where the folder is located! I thought the EXE was corrupt after I'd run oit the first four times so I downloaded it again. Same. Eventually I took a guess at what one of the contained driver files might be called and tracked the folder down using a global search function. I absolutely defy any non-computer expert to install that driver without calling tech support for help. (If Delkin has tech support, that is, they can't do anything else much right.)
But after all that, to my astonishment, the new driver actually works. You can remove the card and replace it with another one without rebooting your system.
Will I use the Delkin now? I don't think I have a lot of choice anymore. The sheer amount of data I have to transfer has gone beyond what I can sensibly do with the little PCMCIA card. But I'll curse the damn thing every time I have to buggerise about swapping flash cards in it.
Would I buy another one?
No way.
Yes, buy a Cardbus CF adaptor. No, don't buy a Delkin.
Find another brand - any other brand would have to be better.
