Sandisk Extreme FireWire Reader

by SanDisk

Product Details

• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 5.2 x 1.9 inches ; 7.2 ounces
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B000I04WWY
• Item model number: SDDRX4-CFR
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (108 customer reviews)
• Date first available at Amazon.com: April 20, 2008

Product Description

The Extreme FireWire (FW) Reader is a high performance reader, which provides you a complete digital system/solution for your photography needs. It offers the highest performance requirement: 40MB/sec (+ or - buffer) sequential read and write. It has one slot for CF (Type I and II). It supports FireWire 800/400 connectivity on both Windows and MAC Operating Systems. It plugs and plays with no external AC power. The Extreme FireWire (FW) Reader supports the Extreme IV CF (Type I and II) cards (all Capacities 2, 4 and 8GB).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

84 of 85 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Time Saver, October 4, 2006

By 

Brian Koch "Aspiring Photographer" (MI United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sandisk Extreme FireWire Reader (Personal Computers)

I recently switched over to shooting RAW (7-9 meg a shot) instead of jpeg (2-4 meg a shot) so I got myself an 8Gig Extreme III card and this reader. I have used many readers in the past, but nothing has even come close to this speed before.

I can put over 1,000 RAW files or about 4,000 jpegs on the card and then transfer them all over to my computer in just a few minutes instead of closer to a half-hour or more. It seems to average around 1Gig a minute.

It is also pretty small so you can travel with it easily. However, if your notebook PC has a 4 pin firewire connection, like many do, this will not work. Firewire needs 6 pin or higher to be able to power devices. I e-mailed SanDisk several times about this and they just gave me the run-around, so I did the research on my own to find this out. So if anyone knows of a way around this please let me know because based on what I saw it is not possible.

49 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fastest card reader for a Mac, October 20, 2009

By 

Jasper Johal "professional photographer" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Sandisk Extreme FireWire Reader (Personal Computers)

Please be aware that all the people giving this product one star reviews are Windows users. If you are a Mac user with a Firewire 400 port (either laptop or desktop, does not matter) you will be very happy with it. If you are a Mac user with a Firewire 800 port, you cannot buy a faster, or more reliable card.

I am a professional fashion photographer who shoots 21 megapixel raw files. Typical number of shots per full day of shooting is two thousand to three thousand. I shoot on Sandisk Extreme IV 8GB and 16 GB cards (even Extreme III cards are too slow for the Canon IDs Mk 3), filling up 4 to 6 cards in a day. So how fast a reader downloads files to my three drives (one main, and two back-ups) is of crucial importance.

This reader is faster and more reliable than the Lexar Firewire 800 reader. I have both, but I get data corruption with the Lexar FW800 reader - four to eight images per card end up being corrupted upon download (though they are ok on the card). I have never had an image show up corrupted when downloading using this Sandisk reader. (By the way, the Lexar Firewire 400 reader is 100% rock solid and reliable. It is slower than this Sandisk reader because the Sandisk is a FW800 reader, but I have happily used two Lexar FW400 readers for years before the FW800 readers came to market.)

51 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Don't blame Sandisk...blame Microsoft., December 2, 2007

By 

Crazy Old Geek (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Sandisk Extreme FireWire Reader (Personal Computers)

I wanted to take advantage of 1394B 800MB Firewire on my Windows XP PC so I bought a Firewire 800 card. However, I was not able to achieve the dramatic transfer speeds that others do. After researching, I found out that Microsoft CRIPPLED Firewire in Windows XP SP2! It is limited to 100MB. They provide a fix but you have to look for it by searching the Microsoft Knowledge Base MSKB for "firewire" and you will find the patch to download. You may also have to edit your registry.
Why did this happen and why has it not been fixed? Why doesn't Sandisk warn us about it? Who knows, but I hope this information helps you.