The problem is with the PCMCIA slot.
Get a USB2 card reader, and it'll improve it dramatically, even using Microdrives. Using a PCMCIA slot, it also took me about 8 mins to d/l a 1GB microdrive, however, with a USB2 reader, 512 probably takes a mins or less.
The weird thing is that I've tried three different brands of USB2 card reader. All three is rated at the high-speed USB2 (some USB2 peripherals actually operate at USB 1.1 speed!), two of them is no brand reader, one of them is a Sandisk reader. One of the no brand reader, however, transfers at double the speed of the other no brand & the Sandisk. So it seems that there are some internal construction design difference that happens to be very crucial. Twice the speed! -- as I monitor through the Activity Monitor. I still don't know exactly how to spot the "fast" USB2 readers.
Neverthless, even the "slow" speed is much much faster than PCMCIA.
Not to mention that USB2 bus is quite large @ 480MB/s, so you can plug in multiple readers and download speed won't drop on each individual reader, until you hit the bottleneck on the harddisk.
I do this via the PCMIA slot with a Microdrive (or 512mB cards) but it takes about 6-8 minutes to transfer 1mB. I'd assumed that being drive to drive this would take a minute or so at most.
Is it any faster with a firewire card reader? Or is there a faster solution out there I haven't come across? Right now it's like having an assistant with two left thumbs.
Definitely don't need a FW reader (although i've never tried one) cause in theory the bottleneck is the card read speed.
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