Delkin Cardbus 32 UDMA CF adapter
I’ve been a fan of the Delkin Cardbus 32 compact flash adapter (seen at left) for years. I wrote a brief review way back in 2004, and it’s been giving me solid service ever since. The combination of fast transfer speeds in a device you can leave permanently in your laptop is pretty attractive for those who travel a lot – no cables, no leaving it behind.
So I was eager to try out Delkin’s new version (seen at right) of the device – the Delkin Cardbus 32 UDMA compact flash adapter – and received one today. UDMA camera cards such as Sandisk’s Extreme IV and Ducati range, or Lexar’s Professional 300x range, are said to offer transfer speeds up to 45MB/sec. To obtain those speeds for recording images you need a UDMA-enabled camera such as the EOS-1Ds MkIII and Nikon D3. Other cameras – such as the EOS-1D MkII and MkIII will happily use such cards, they just won’t get the full speed.
Unfortunately I’ve neither a UDMA-enabled camera nor any UDMA 300x cards, so I’m not going to attain those speeds. I currently use an EOS-1D MkII with 133x or 150x cards.
To make a pretty-unscientific test though, I completely filled a 2GB Ridata 150x CF card with images, and then copied it to my Windows XP laptop using PhotoMechanic’s Ingest function with both the old adapter and new one, and was surprised to find that even with these slow cards the speed increase of the new adapter over the old one is significant.
The results were:
OLD adapter : 308 seconds / 6.49 MB/sec
NEW UDMA adapter : 140 seconds / 14.3 MB/sec
Now, these speeds are fairly meaningless if you want to compare against other cards & readers, but they do show that even with slower non-UDMA cards the new adapter is faster than the older one and therefore a worthy upgrade.
Delkin also make Expresscard adapters to fit the newer-style Expresscard slot found on modern laptops, but what I don’t like about these is either the adapter sticks out from the laptop, or the card does, or both – with the Cardbus version you can keep the adapter and card in the laptop without having to worry about it getting snagged and broken.
Note: To use any of these adapters on either Windows XP or Mac OS X, you must first install the adapter-specific drivers – which can be downloaded here
UPDATE 23/05/09:
With an 8GB Sandisk Extreme III “30MB/sec” UDMA card and the Delkin Cardbus 32 UDMA CF adapter, I’m getting around 29MB/Sec read speed, which is about the limit of the card, so I imagine with something like an Extreme IV it could go even higher. Clearly it’s a fast adapter…
