When I shot the BrewPub series of videos, there's a scene that was captured live where I was copying files from the OWC CFExpress card using the Express card reader to the external OWC drive, and I was genuinely blown away at how fast it was. That was a real reaction; it was the first time I'd copied files like that, and the speeds were insane. Well… as I was falling asleep last night I remembered that I needed to ship some of this stuff back to OWC and I thought that I should do some more measured comparisons to see how different the speeds really are, while I still have the gear. The note that I left myself as I was falling asleep, said to compare copying internal to internal, meaning internal SD card reader to internal SSD drive, vs internal to external, so to the external 1M2 drive, and then external to external, so using the OWC card readers. Then as I sat down to do a “quick video” this morning, I realized there was a lot more permutations to compare, including copying from SD cards, CFExpress cards, and, of course, I should compare using SSD drives, since on many cameras, like the GH7, you can now capture directly to SSD. And, by the way, while OWC did sponsor that video in the past, this one isn't explicitly sponsored, but I wanted to run these tests to see these numbers for myself, and I figured that if I was interested, that you might be too. So, here's the tests I'm about to run, and all the pieces, and all of their claimed speeds. I put the same mix of various resolution and bitrate video files, plus RAW and JPEG photos, to all the media, so we'd have an exact comparison for the tests. The SD cards are the OWC Atlas Ultra 256GB cards, which claims a read speed of 300 MB/s and a write speed of 250 MB/s. The CFExpress card is the OWC CFExpress 4.0 Type B Atlas Ultra 2TB card, which claims a read speed of 3,650 MB/s, and a write speed of 3,000 MB/s – so, you know, it's just a little bit faster! The SSD for camera capture is the OWC Envoy Pro Elektron; a USB 3.2 – that's 10 Gb/s, which is 1,250 MB/s – SSD drive. Now that performance number is the USB interface itself, not necessarily the media inside of it, so we'll see when we copy files. So that's what we're copying from. The readers we'll use to copy are… first, the Mac's internal SD card reader. This is a 16” M2 Max MacBook Pro running macOS Sonoma 14.6.1. The Apple System Information report shows that this internal reader has a link speed of a single lane 5.0 GT/s, which I had to look up, and surprisingly doesn't mean Gin & Tonics per second, but means “gigatransfer per second”, which converts to 500 MB/s or 4 Gbps. Then we have the OWC Atlas Dual SD Reader, which is a dual SD card reader with a USB 3.2 interface, accurately reported by Apple's system information that it's a 10Gb/s interface, with dual 5 Gb/s readers. So that means you should get maximum copy performance from each card slot regardless if you're copying from one card or two simultaneously. This is a really neat card reader by the way, with a built-in short cable for travel, which you can then tuck away, and it has a port on the back to plug into a longer cable if its more convenient like when you're at your desk. Then for the CFExpress cards, we of course have to use an external reader since the computer doesn't have a CFExpress card reader built in, and this is the OWC Atlas CFx 4.0 Reader. This is a 40 Gb/s reader, which by the way, you do have to use a 40 Gb/s cable take advantage of. It of course comes with its own cable, but I'm using these Kondor Blue 40 gigabit cables, because, well – Kondor Blue! And finally, we're copying to the Mac's internal SSD, which the Apple System Information report doesn't actually say anything about the interface performance, but we'll test with Blackmagic Disk Speed test, and then to the OWC Express 1M2 drive, which I have the 2TB version of. Like the CFExpress reader, this a 40 Gb/s interface, again with a Kondor Blue 40 Gb/s cable – but again yes, of course the drive comes with its own cable as well. So, that's the setup. Let's start by benchmarking the two destination drives. First up is the internal SSD. The tests varied dramatically so I let Speed Test run five times and averaged them. You can see the write test hitting as low as 2721 MB/s and as high as 6436 MB/s. I feel like with the repeated tests it's cached the data – I don't know exactly how the BMD Speed Test works – so we may be seeing artificially higher numbers. But the average write speed came in at about 5,348 MB/s. Then for the read tests, it was much more consistent, with an average of 5,206 MB/s. For the OWC Express 1M2 drive, the results are lower, but also far more consistent, and still blindingly fast. The average across three tests were 3,146 MB/s write, and 2,885 MB/s read. Keep in mind these numbers may not convert when we actually start copying real data – so don't even begin to think you've got any kind of an answer here yet. I also benchmarked the little Envoy Pro Elektron drive, and it reported very consistent numbers, with averages of 965 MB/s write and 807 MB/s read. Here's an interesting comparison as well; I've converted all these number to Gb/s so we have consistency to compare the actual results to the interface specs, meaning the maximum possible, theoretical performance. Remember that in any drive test there are two components of the drive; there's the interface, in this case USB 4 and USB 3.2 and something else for the internal SSD, and then the actual media inside. Since we don't have interface numbers for the internal drive we can't compare that, but the 1M2 40 Gb/s interface is getting 25 and 23 Gb/s performance, while the Envoy Pro with a 10 Gb/s interface is getting 7.7 and 6.5 Gb/s performance. Whatever the Mac is using internally, it's clearly not limited to 40 Gb/s, since we got nearly 43 and 42 Gb/s speeds there. Alright – our baselines are set. Let's get some copying done. I'm using an app called Offshoot by Hedge to do the file copies. One reason is it'll report the exact transfer times in the logs so I don't have to sit here with a stopwatch, but more importantly, Offshoot is much more than a Finder copy. It does checksums, can copy to multiple destinations at once, can rename files on import, and a bunch more. I use this for all my media copies. They aren't sponsors, and I bought the license myself. I just really recommend using this software for camera card copies instead of just using the Finder or Explorer. And yes, this software is on macOS and Windows, and even on the iPad. I'll put a link to them below; I highly recommend you check them out. Alright… obviously you don't want to watch a series of tests so… here's a little file copy montage. The data being copied is about 227 GB, and again is a mix of various video and still photo files. Starting with internal to internal, on this very fast SD card – ok maybe not fast compared to what else we're looking at today, but as far as SD cards go, the Atlas Ultras are super fast. Copy time for 227 GB from the internal SD card reader to the internal SSD was 14 minutes and 51 seconds, at a data rate of a quarter of a gigabyte per second, or almost 255 MB per second, or about 2 gigabits per second. So that's our baseline! Remember those cards advertise a 300 MB/s read speed, so 255 MB/s sustained is great. Copying from the internal reader to the OWC Express 1M2 SSD drive, the copy time is virtually identical, as expected, since certainly the slowest part of this chain is the SD card itself. And before we move on, let me point out that this *is* very fast for an SD card. These are essentially the fastest SD cards on the market today. Most SD cards are considerably slower, advertising peak 200 MB/s read speeds which means the sustained will be well below that. It wouldn't be uncommon to see a 30 minute, or more, copy time for this much data from lesser cards. Testing the OWC Dual SD card reader to both the internal and external drives are only a little bit faster than using the internal card reader; closer to 14 minutes and around 270 MB/s. So at first glance, it hardly seems worth the expense and hassle of using an external reader – until you remember that these have dual card slots. Copying two cards simultaneously copied 427 GB in 15 minutes and 41 seconds – that's a combined transfer rate of 450 MB/s or 3.6 gbps. So that's a significant improvement if you regularly shoot to more than one card. You are essentially cutting your copy time in half, not to mention that you don't have to take the time to remove one card, insert another, and start a new copy. Now let's look at the CFExpress Type B cards. Let me prepare you – it's ridiculous. The performance is stunning. Once you experience speed like this, everything else is downright “molasses in winter”. For my non-native English speaking friends, that means everything else seems slow. Really, really slow. Copy times from the CFExpress card to the internal drive and the external drive are once again nearly identical, and instead of taking 15 minutes, are done in under a minute and 40 seconds. 2.3 Gigabytes per second. GigaBYTES! “Gigawatts!” 2300 Megabytes per second. Over 18 gigabits per second. It is nine times faster. I'll just let that sink in for moment. So, CFExpress is super fast, but the cards aren't cheap, and of course not that many cameras even support them. But there is something in-between – capturing to SSD drive on the camera instead of to SD or CFExpress cards inside the camera. This Envoy Pro Elektron works perfectly with the LUMIX GH7 and costs just $300 for 2TB, while the CFExpress card costs $680 for 2TB. The Elektron is less than half the price of CFExpress, but how does that compare to the cost of SD cards? Well, these fast SD cards, first of all, max out at 512MB and that costs $500, so you're looking at $2,000 for 2TB of fast SD cards. That makes the CFExpress cards a veritable bargain by comparison, and a lot faster, *if* your camera supports them. But! We're talking about the SSD drive now, at a cost of just 15% of the SD cards; again $300 for 2TB vs $2,000. So what's the SSD performance? Well, copying from the Envoy Pro Elektron to either the internal or external SSD took just five minutes, at about 750 MB/s, or 6 Gb/s. Still three times as fast as SD cards, and of course this is 2TB on a single drive, instead of four or eight or more SD cards. So if your camera supports SSD, you can gain significant capacity, triple the performance – or more if you're coming from lesser cards – and save considerable money. Finally I want to circle back to this drive, the 1M2. In all tests, it performed essentially the same as the internal drive. So what was the point of including it in these tests? Well the point was to show that an external drive can be nearly or just-as fast as the internal drives on these machines. We all know how incredibly fast the internal SSDs are on modern computers, like this MacBook Pro. Basically any standard external drive you buy is going to be an order of magnitude slower than the internal drive. But you can now buy an external SSD that is, for most uses, just as fast as the internal drive. OK, there's my roundup. By all means, run these tests yourself; put any amount of media on your cards and copy them to your drives and do the math to see what you get. Let me know in the comments if you run some tests, what your results are. And if your numbers make you sad, check out OWC. I have affiliate links to all this stuff in the description below, so if you decide to buy based on these results, I'd certainly appreciate you using my links. Double check to make sure that you're subscribed, and I'll see you in the next video!
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