USB3 Speed Tests

The increase of solid state cameras in the broadcast television market, such as Sony’s F3 and EX3, and Canon’s XF305 means that IT has now become an integral part of the acquisition process. While time and money can be saved on digitising from tape, project planning now has to take into account the transfer of footage from cards to hard drive. On a long multi camera shoot, the volume of data, and the time it takes to transfer can be massive. Data wranglers can now spend hours locked in a dark room with a pile of hard drives and a handful of cards, waiting to be copied so that they can be re-used the next day.

Procam have been very conscious of the time that transfers can take. We know that transfer speeds are only as fast as the slowest part of the chain, so have been looking for the fastest solution from card reader through to hard drive.

We kept a close eye on developments with the various interfaces that were announced or introduced in 2010:

Firewire 800, exclusive to Apple has now been abandoned, in favour of their new interface Thunderbolt. Once again this is exclusive to Apple, and no thunderbolt devices are on the horizon any time soon.

E-Sata, with a maximum transfer speed of 3gbps is a great interface, 6 times faster than USB2. New laptops however only come with 1 E-Sata port, and devices cannot be used on older laptops that have no port. While there is a selection of fast hard drives using this interface, no readers have been made, and even if they were, there would be nowhere to plug them in.

USB3 however emerged in 2010, and looks set to become the standard interface across all products. Why? It boasts transfer speeds up to 5gbps, that’s over ten times faster than current USB speeds. Most new laptops are arriving fitted with two or more USB3 ports, and the best thing is that USB3 is backwards compatible. What that means is if you have an older USB hard drive, desktop or laptop, and new USB3 devices will still work with it. Therefore there will be no pressure to go out and replace every part of your IT infrastructure.

Procam has been supplying USB3 and E-Sata hard drives for a while now, but our clients weren’t able to reep the full benefits of the available speed, as no reliable USB3 card readers had come into the marketplace.  That has now just changed, so the last bit of the jigsaw is now complete.

We ran some tests using a Photofast USB3 card reader, Sony Vaio F Series USB3 laptop, and Lacie USB3 Rugged drive. Some of the results were amazing:

* Test done for XDCAM EX (8GB) are using new SxS G1A card (1.2gbps) and express card slot of laptop. Using SxS Pro or SxS G1 cards and Sony's Usb SxS card reader will bring much slower results.

The biggest improvements seen were with footage shot on Compact Flash Card, from Canon XF305s for example, with transfer speeds reduced to a quarter. The impact on shoot costs could be truly noticeable, providing you use the correct IT equipment. You’ll notice that there wasn’t a massive improvement in the speed using MSPRO DUO or SD cards. As stated above, the speed will only be as fast as the slowest part of the chain, in this case it’s the card itself.

Procam now supplies USB3 readers, drives and laptops as standard.