Things I Learned: Video and Image USB Transfer Rates

 Using my camera as a camera and my computer as a computer just works better.

The video files from POTA and SOTA outings on the new camera weigh in on the order of GBs of data. That makes for some pretty great videos, but also for slowish transfer speeds, especially from the camera's USB port out to the desktop computer at home. The camera, a Panasonic Lumic DC G100D was clocking 15 MB/s downloading data to the computer. Switching to a Thunderbolt USB-C cable moved things to 16 MB/s. When I tried to move video files from the computer back into the camera's SD card, that data rate was even slower at aout 5 MB/s.

Fortunately, 12 year-old Mota, (internet alias), got a GameBoy knockoff for his sib for Christmas. The little gadgete uses a micro-SD card, and so yesterday Tawnse asked if we could get an SD reader so we could  move games on and off the machine. I ordered one. This morning, when I tried to use the SD port on said reader to move files from the camera's SD card, they went at a much faster 83 MB/s! 

As usual, integrating the kids' interests and mine is working out great :)

Update:

The point of moving the videos to another computer was that that computer was on the better WiFi network. Once I had the card reader on that computer, I tried another experiment. I tried to move a video directly from the card to Google Photos. The estimated time, once things setttled, for the transfer was 22  minutes. When I instead moved the file off the card, onto the computer, and then to Google Photos, the card to computer transfer took about two minutes, and the internet transfer rate went down to 20 minutes, so not worth the effort for one file at a time at any rate.

It also looks like moving files to Google Drive is faster than moving files to Google Photos. The settled estimate for the same size of transfer at 4:49 was 16 mintues. That transfer is directly from the SD card to the internet. I'll keep you posted on how reliable that number is.

The Chromebook I'm using only has one USB C port that brings in power, and at the moment is also reading the SD card. The computer slept and dropped the transfer since it wasn't on wall power. Trying again at 5:04, 18 - 19 minutes left at 5:05.  Sigh... 18 - 19 minutes at 5:46. Still having issues with measuring, but at 6:19 the estimate for a 3.8 GB file is about 11 minutes. Strike that, 17 minutes. 

Grrr setting time. 7:07 and 20 minute estimate. Already done at 7:26.

7:27 took less than 14 the next time I tried.