I just discovered something really nifty about my new computer (although annoying at the same time).
It came with a 6-in-1 card reader, which I thought was hooked directly to a PCI card slot or maybe an IDE slot so it should have gone faster. And in fact it did as compared to loading from camera or from my picture pad via USB 1.0. (basically about 2 minutes instead of 4 minutes per card). Plus the card is loaded directly into the drive; very convienent when at home. The time to load the card into the picture pad itself is normally about 2-3 minutes, so until I got the 6-in-1 it was faster to load the CF cards into the picture pad and then dump all at once to the computer instead of using the camera connection one card at a time.
However, I recently got the USB2.0 adapter for the picture pad and tried it out on my new computer. I discovered that the front USB ports (part of the 6-in-1 device) are USB1.0. I learned this because my computer warned that I had a USB 2.0 device plugged into a USB 1.0 port. However, I knew my computer had USB 2.0 ports so I tried the back ones. Way faster. What used to take 4 minutes per card now takes about 15 seconds.
So unless my computer is sitting right there, I am back to downloading my CF cards to the picture pad.
The annoying part is I was under the impression that all of my USB ports were 2.0 capable. I also have 2 firewire ports, one on the back and one on the front (again as part of the 6-in-1). So am very curious if one will go faster then the other, but don't have any firewire devices to try it out with.
The above experience was similiar to the one where I thought my lenses were autofocusing plenty fast, but a friend thought they were really slow. And then I got the 16-35L and it was way faster and the 50/1.4 is faster still.
Learn something new every day or so.
Thought I would share
