Upgraded camera and files are now 25mb so importing pictures takes forever. It seems like USB reader will be slow too. Which route is best firewire external reader or portable drive with card reader? Are there any external SATA readers on a market?

For really efficient & fast transfers from memory cards to PC/Mac I recommend:

- CF SanDisk Extreme IV
- CF Reader SanDisk Extreme FireWire Reader

Pls note that the effective transfer rate depend from the combination CF + Reader and therefore the suggested reader make sense only if used with the mentioned CF or alike (Lexar Professional 233x series and any other CF compliant with UDMA Mode 4).

Also note that the advertised transfer rate published by the manufacturers (SanDisk, Lexar and others) is meant in lab environment and with 1MB = 1.000.000 of bytes. In real life, the 40MB/sec claimed by SanDisk for their Extreme IV combo translate in actual 35-37 MB/sec.

In case u have many CF's to be transferred into your workstation just buy two CF FireWire Reader and do double CF's copy in parallel. In that case the transfer speed of each single reader will drop down of 4-5% buy it will still make the difference...

As far as concern for the portable HD with integrated CF reader, I am very happy with NEXTO (http://www.nextodi.com/en/) products: I have bought already two of them and found very fast and reliable. Moreover they can be powered with external battery pack for emergency and also by means of a standard car lighter (I am using connected to a portable rollable solar panel).

bye!