I was initially bothered by the slow read and write time of this drive [from Muvo2] in 10D and was considering sending it back. After a bit of research, I found out that if the drive is formatted in PC with 32K of allocation size, it will run much faster.
You can plug in the drive in a card reader, then go to computer management, and format the drive using FAT32, 32K option.
The result?
1 Shot: <8 seconds
9Shot burst: <55 seconds
That's faster than my 512MB simpletech CF card.
If your result differs, please let me know.
I tested the drive empty, so once it gets filled up, mileage may vary.
Yes, it's going to reduce the number of shots it will hold, but probably not by much. I don't know what the block size was before he reformatted, but I would guess 8K. If that was the case, each photo would have wasted on average half of that, or 4K. Now the slack is about 16K per photo, so you will get fewer shots, but probably not many less.
I just did a quick calculation. If block size was 8K and it's now 32K, each file will require on average 12K more space. With a 10D shooting raw + small jpg, I get about 160 shots on a 1GB card, or about 640 on a 4GB card. That would work out to about 7680K more space required for 640 images. That's less than 2 shots!
Makes changing the block size a no-brainer.
Charlie
Edited by cvdunton on Jan 31, 2004 at 06:09 PM GMT
we speak about 24K maximum....for 400frame it is only 9mo...so 1 frame in raw....well.....not really much to talk about...so in theory yes...in real life no
Edited by siger125 on Jan 31, 2004 at 11:07 PM GMT
I have a 300D and tried the 32K format tip, but did not see any difference.
Check the jpg file sizes produced after the test to be sure any savings in write time were not caused by smaller jpgs.
Here's what I found, Max 4 shot burst:
RAW 6.5MB files... 40sec
JPG LF 3.5MB files... 25 sec
I find in use, that multishot with the 4GB card is too slow, at 10 sec/shot your waiting 17 minutes when taking 100. If your at a sporting event thats just too long.
I use Large Jpg Fine or Large Normal instead. Large Normal brings the burst time down to 15s, and the wait per 100 shots to just over 6 minutes. Not bad.
you can always get it on ebay, from all the people that have already taken them out for you. But then they're going for about $100 over what the muvo costs
I've just tried mine in 32K cluster. Wow, what an improvement over the 16K cluster setting. I have the real slow Sandisk 1GB but at least the MD is on par with the Sandisk now.
