Wondering what kind of speed improvements the floppy adapters offer over straight serial port uploads to the PC. Only thing I've seen says it's "faster, but not as fast as a standalone card reader".

Anyone have one of these?

-- Tony Mason (tmason@paisd.com), October 07, 1998

Answers

I guess it's time for a site-wide search-engine capability, because my faulty memory is failing me on this one: I know we wrote up transfer times for the FlashPath, but can't remember exactly where!

:-(

We did note in the PDR-M1 review that the data transfer rate was "about the same as a floppy" (probably no surprise), so if you were to time copying files to or from a floppy, you'd be very much in the ballpark. The beta Mac drivers from Fuji (see the July 30 news post in the news archives for the link) are a fair bit slower (maybe 70% of the PC speed), but still much better than serial.

-- Dave Etchells (web@imaging-resource.com), October 10, 1998.

Well, I can't contribute any comparative times for the transfer process of the flashpath floppy adapter, but we have been using it for about 6 months on our Olympus D500-L and we love it. With a Win-95 PC, just insert the "floppy" and start up Windows Explorer. Then "Open" the 3.5 Inch drive and shift-click the first and last files listed. Then right-click and drag to the destination folder and let go. Wait less than 3 minutes (it seems, anyway) and come back and hit the delete key to clear the "chip". It is fantastic. From the store demo I saw of the serial interface, you could not _pay_ me to switch to it. This requires no special software (except a driver) and if you can use Windows Explorer you can unload your pictures. We absolutely love it.

-- Hank Freeman (hfreeman@netscape.net), October 11, 1998.

Just to make sure people understand: It doesn't require a special *application* but it DOES require special software -- the driver which reads the card via the floppy drive. If it were a hardware-only solution I'd probably have one, since I'd be able to use it on my UNIX box and carry it around to transfer snapshots to friends' PCs (without going through an install step for a driver they'll never use again).

-- Ben Jackson (ben@ben.com), October 11, 1998.

The official answer is that FlashPath adapters are about 7 times faster than serial cables. It gets really confusing with Kilobits, kilobytes, and megabits.

-- Kevin Yamano (kevin.yamano@tais.toshiba.com), October 22, 1998.