I find it convenient to transfer files over the network. I have an Ethernet network available and wondered how fast it can be to transfer files that way.
So I set up an FTP Server (Bitvise SSH, which is free for personal use) and did some tests and made some interesting discoveries.
The Sony A1 supports 3 protocols for transfer: SFTP, FTPES and plain FTP. When doing a transfer over the internet, SFTP is the easiest to set up and the most secure.
Unfortunately, the transfer speed varies with the protocol used.
Doing a LAN transfer over Ethernet, I got these speeds:
- plain FTP: around 950 Mbits (limited by the interface, which 1Gbit/s on the A1, for the record, the A1 II supports 2.5Gbit/s).
- FTPES: around 800-850 Mbit/s
- SFTP: 200-250 Mbit/s (much slower, probably due to the A1 processor not fast enough to encrypt the data).
Over WiFi, things equalize a bit since it's slow even on 5G. The max I could reach, regardless of the protocol, was around 300Mbit/s, except for SFTP.
I've settled on using SFTP only when transferring over the internet. Locally, I will just use FTPES, which is only around 10% slower than plain FTP (and Bitvise SSH supports only SFTP and FTPES) and more than 2 times faster than SFTP.
I could use a card reader or simply connect the camera through USB. It's probably faster, especially the CFe card readers, which could reach 10-15X the speed of gigabit Ethernet. But I forgot my card in the reader enough times that I prefer to avoid it. Besides, CFe readers are quite expensive.
I also have an A7R III that supports FTP, but no Ethernet and the WiFi is only using 2.4Ghz, so the speed is much, much slower. Not really useful.
Of course we cannot know for sure, but I suspect that it's worth looking into another SFTP implementation, not Bitvise. The BIONZ processor in the A1 is based on Armv8 which supports hardware acceleration for all common encryption algorithms. Both FTPS and SFTP commonly use AES as a symmetric cypher. ARM cores even from 10 years ago could do far more than 300mb/s. Even a low-end Cortex core in the Raspberry Pi 3 easily encrypts faster than an SSD write throughput, let alone gigabit LAN. Besides, FTPS which is likely uses the same cypher works fine for you. So basically I suspect that encryption itself is not a problem, but a poor software implementation somewhere. I would start with the SFTP implementation in Bitvise and would test against the gold standard: OpenSSH.
Manu-K1 wrote:
I could use a card reader or simply connect the camera through USB. It's probably faster, especially the CFe card readers, which could reach 10-15X the speed of gigabit Ethernet. But I forgot my card in the reader enough times that I prefer to avoid it. Besides, CFe readers are quite expensive.
old-gregg wroteBesides, FTPS which is likely uses the same cypher works fine for you. So basically I suspect that encryption itself is not a problem, but a poor software implementation somewhere. I would start with the SFTP implementation in Bitvise and would test against the gold standard: OpenSSH.
You may be right, but I doubt Bitvise is the issue; it seems to be a well-rounded software. Besides, the CPU on the server does not seem to be solicited that much during transfers. But you never know, I will test with OpenSSH. FTPS is also a tad slower than plain FTP. In this case, I also tested with the FileZilla FTP server, and the speed was identical to Bitvise. Which leads me to suspect that if there is a poor software implementation, it's unfortunately on the A1 side. SFTP was added through a firmware update (2.0?) on the A1. Maybe the implementation is not optimal?
