I'm using 1.5 GHz Powerbook G4 with a Delkin PC card adapter. It took about an hour to offload about 5.5GB to an external hard drive with FW800 compared to half an hour offloading it with the camera connected via USB. Does this seem ridiculously slow? I rather not go with a external card reader unless there's a drastic difference. Are there alternative PC card adapters that are faster?

not sure about notebooks but on my pc amd 4400 and a avteck card reader its like a hard drive transfer within minutes

Something definitely doesn't sound right with what you have going on there. It takes me about 25 min. to transfer about 25 gigs. My setup is a little different than yours though: Card Reader, Macbook Pro, eSATA external, and 30MB/s Sandisk 32gb Extreme III. I think that a big portion of it may be the CF card that you're using? I have a cheaper 8 gig and I'm pretty sure that I remember it being much slower.

I used a Lexar 8GB 133x. Also have a transcend 16GB 133x but didn't test that one yet. Speed is actually not that important but it just strikes me as kinda odd that the pc card slot is two times slower than USB. Just wondering if I got a bad pc card adapter or are all pc card adapters going to be equally slow.

I use the same Transcend 133x card, but I use a FW800 card reader by Lexar. I was able to transfer about 10GB in 12 minutes. It has another FW800 port on the back so you can daisy-chain the hard drive to it. It would be worth a try to buy this and see if your transfers speed up. If not, you can just return it. An hour is a ridiculous time to wait in my opinion.

You don't say *which* Delkin adapter you have, they make different ones - if it's one of the Cardbus adapters (as opposed to the slower "PC Card" adapters) then have you checked you have the latest drivers from Delkin installed? You do need drivers installed for these cardbus adapters.

The best/fastest cardbus reader in my mind is the "Delkin Cardbus 32 UDMA CF adapter". See my brief review here:

http://www.snappertalk.com/index.php/20080605/delkin-cardbus-32-udma-cf-adapter/

Michael

Does the Laxar take its poser from the Firewire or need and external power source?

Just wondered, I'm using an old USB card reader and it take forever to transfer to the Mac

Cheers

Avey

The Lexar Firewire 800 reader is self-powered & mega-fast. It's easily quicker than any USB device that I have tried. Note that there is a Lexar Firewire 400 reader too which presumably isn't as fast.