Portable Storage Device - CompactDrive

chrisjlee

external harddrives are cheap...
Gary, check out the zen portable media player and/or get an external harddrive.

Then again you carry enough gear. Your backpack is heavy as hell.
Maxtor Personal Storage 3100 250GB 7200rpm External USB 2.0 Hard Drive $134.99, Oct 17 05
1 day sale. newegg has the Maxtor Personal Storage 3100 250GB 7200rpm External USB 2.0 Hard Drive 16MB Cache $134.99, $6.99 3 day shipping.

Theres also the creative zen portable media center that's cheap nowadays

Creative Zen Portable Media Center 20GB $199.95 - October 17, 2005
Price drop. Buy.com has the Creative DAP-HD0013 Zen Portable Media Center 20GB MP3/Video Player is available for $199.95 after rebate, Free shipping. Tax in CA, MA, MD, TN

Source (techbargains.com)

gus

Ive got an old X-drive garry & you cant kill it. I have shot 6 gigs a day a few times with it.

That link has 20 diff ones to choose from actually.


Gus

ian408

Why not get another couple of flash cards? The good news is they don't
chew up batteries

Ian

dragon300zx

ian408 wrote:

Why not get another couple of flash cards? The good news is they don't
chew up batteries

Ian

Oh I'm getting more of those too soon. At least one more gig at the end of the week and then another 2 by xmas for a total of 6 1gig cards. But you can ask chris. The thought of missing something at an event and not getting enough photos freaks me out. I think he had to dump each of my cards onto my laptop twice. That was shooting raw on the 10D. On the 20D takes more memory and If I'm shooting with both of them... The laptop is great when I have an assistant but there are times I don't, or times when I would rather have the assistant shooting with me for another angle rather than dumping my cards. Plus for the $135 that would buy me one 1 gig card possible 2 if there was a good sale somewhere I got a stand alone storage drive with 40gig capacity. Plus this device makes the laptop not as required which can drop about 9 pounds from my backpack unless I need to have it to check shots at full size.

Lee Massey

Sigh...
*sigh* It looks like the rebate is only valid in the US. It sounds like a great deal though!

Thanks for the link!

Lee

chrisjlee wrote:

Theres also the creative zen portable media center that's cheap nowadays

Creative Zen Portable Media Center 20GB $199.95 - October 17, 2005
Price drop. Buy.com has the Creative DAP-HD0013 Zen Portable Media Center 20GB MP3/Video Player is available for $199.95 after rebate, Free shipping. Tax in CA, MA, MD, TN

Source (techbargains.com)

gus

You got me thinking gary. If you get 6 1 gig CF cards then its only a few bob more to buy another 2 & make it 8. Now thats really getting up there storage capacity wise.

No batteries....no leads...no hassle of another thing to carry etc etc

Gus

dragon300zx

Humungus wrote:

You got me thinking gary. If you get 6 1 gig CF cards then its only a few bob more to buy another 2 & make it 8. Now thats really getting up there storage capacity wise.

No batteries....no leads...no hassle of another thing to carry etc etc

Gus

yeah but if I find I don't need my drive that shipped today I'll sell it. Just like Andy.

mercphoto

Oakley wrote:

I just bought a CompactDrive PD70X with an 80GB hard drive.

I almost bought that, but got an Epson P-2000 instead. I'm still not sure if I actually need a device with a screen, but I do admit I used it once to insure I really did download a card (could not remember if I had or not). If you have discipline and stick to a routine (out of camera, into device, download) then you never have to worry about that. The screen is nice, but like any LCD, its hard to see in daylight.

I do like the Epson. However, I do not find it downloading files from the card anywhere near as quickly as I was led to believe. If you don't need a screen however, get the PD70X.

Higgmeister

I use a Digibin unit. I paid $99 for the OEM version (no drive) and paid another $80 for a 60Gig laptop drive. The Digibin uses internal rechargeable LiON batteries. I have not ever run out of juice while shooting, but I have run out of juice while downloading to the computer. My unit is only a USB1.1 so it takes a bit of time to download to the computer. For the price, I love it. If you go the OEM way, you will need to format the drive before putting it into the unit. It is very fast at downloading from the card to the HD, slow from unit to computer. They do have an upgrade to USB2, but it costs as much as I paid for the unit.

Chris

Sam

dragon300zx wrote:

andy The external ard drives are good and I'm getting one next week as I have already used 100Gb on my desktop hdd. But I was talking more something portable that I could carry on my belt and backup cf cards while on the fly shooting an event. What I went with is this:

Flash-HD to Go! (40GB)

....

I went ahead and ordered one of these as well. If it doesn't work I will hire Yuri's jurist and sue the pants of you. :

Sam

dragon300zx

Sam wrote:

I went ahead and ordered one of these as well. If it doesn't work I will hire Yuri's jurist and sue the pants of you. :

Sam

That jurist of Yuri's in those photos earlier? She wouldn't have to sue me. If thats what she wanted she would just have to ask.

annab

Haven't tried it yet but the CompactDrive is on my list of Christmas gifts to myself.

You shouldn't have a problem using it as a backup since it's essentially a hard disk for notebooks in a case. Of interest may be SyncToy, a new Powertoy for Windows XP (http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/prophoto/synctoy.mspx) to help you manage the sync.

There's also a RAW Image Thumbnailer powertoy as well (off topic, I know): http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/digitalphotography/prophoto/raw.mspx

ian408

Hi All,

Just merged these threads together to combine some of the things people
are looking for in portable storage.

Cheers,
Ian

dragon300zx

First Impressions of the MediaGear (mymediagear.com) Portable Flash-HD to go.

These are just my first impressions and I will updated these in a couple days once I have been able to do massive amounts of testing.

First off It's bigger than I had hoped. Not super big but about an inch and a half almost two inches thick and I was hoping it would only be about an inch thick.

It really is a one touch transfer system. Which is ok but I was hoping I could as least view the photo files to make sure they had transferred over to the unit properly instead of just trusting the 100% transferred readout. I wish there was some menu functionality so I could view the file trees on the hdd.

The carry case doesn't have a belt strap (gonna have to modify that)

I'm hoping the battery life will be ok as it would take tools to change the battery.

Their software sucks (the installation of it does at least, not for the lamen).

The positives

The cost. $135.00 for a 40Gb stand alone portable media storage device is cheap.

So far the transfer speeds seem pretty good.

It will do what I need it to (hopefully).


Now to see how it performs in the real world.


Another thing I just noticed. This may not bug some people but it did me. The case they send has a magnetic snap on it instead of a reagular one. Magnets and storage media don't mix all that great normally so I promptly removed this.

davemj98

Sony Vaio Pocket
I got one of these for a trip to arizona. GF and I dumped 1200+ pictures into it during the week, and I listened to my favorite music on the flight to & fro. They are now discontinued, and are still available at a much better price. When not in use, it sits on the desk and is read as a 40 GB drive by ny computer.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000309ZLW/ref=gw_de_a_td/103-2331445-4168618?v=glance&s=electronics&n=507846&vi=tech-data