Well… if you are a regular listener to the Digital Convergence Podcast that I co-host with Carl Olson, or if you just happened to catch Episode 82 last week, you may have heard me mention a solution that I found for a Thunderbolt CF Card Reader. Well, the little bugger came in the mail this weekend and I have the test results.
First off, let me tell you that I don’t recommend this solution so if your time is valuable you can move on, but if you want to know why, you can read the details.
The “reader” is really an after market CF to SATA adapter that comes in a cute little shell, the item can then be slide into a Seagate Go-Flex Thunderbolt cradle and you effectively have built an ad-hoc CF to thunderbolt card reader. (NOTE… i don’t know if I’m using the word “ad-hoc” properly there but I’m nearly 50 years old and eventually I had to use that word in a sentence and today seemed like a good day to give it a go).
There are a few problems with this configuration. 1. its hard to align the adpater into the cradle. 2. the cradle mount is too high so effectively the thing ‘floats’ in mid air, its very light so this isn’t that big of a deal but still… 3. once you put a card into the adapter, there is no release mechanism so, if you don’t have finger nails, good luck getting that little bugger out of there. But the number one reason why I don’t recommend this ‘solution’ is this… SPEED.
This gizmo actually was SLOWER then one of my older SanDisk Firewire 800 card readers. By much, no but it was slower
8GB of data transfer went like this:
Thunderbolt 3:30
Firewire 3:06
I’m not sure why this is the case, but there you have it. I appologize to the listeners that got excited about this “find” but if it makes any difference I was really excited too so now we ALL know how it feels to be disappointed. (PS, there’s no easter bunny either).