Bill Pearce wrote:
> I'm hoping one of you at least has some expoerence with the portable storage
> devices. By this I mean the boxes with a laptop hard drive and a bunch of
> card reader slots. The two that I see mentioned positively most often are the
> Jobos and the Hyperdrives. Any recommentations?
>
I can say the concept certainly works, but I have no experience with
anything now on the market. I bought one of these for $115.
<http://cgi.ebay.com/SmartDisk-FTXXT40-FlashTrax-XT-40GB-Digital-Multimedia_W0QQitemZ200235528447QQihZ010QQcategoryZ15055QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD1VQQcmdZViewItemQQ_trksidZp1638Q2em118Q2el1247>
It can do a lot of things in addition to acting as portable image
storage, but I haven't tried them. I'm not particularly recommending
this product. It was discontinued when the company that made it was
bought by another maker of similar things. It's not too smart, and there
will be no firmware updates - it doesn't recognize that it has already
downloaded part of a card before, and downloads the whole card again.
Each download is a new sub-directory. It's easy enough to erase the old
directory.
As proof of concept, though, I'm sold. Just stick a CF card into the
side and push a button to have the images saved to disk. Don't have to
turn it on or any thing. Plug it into a USB port, and it's a USB 2.0
mass storage device that shows up as a HD.
I wasn't comfortable buying one without image viewing capability. The
modest size and quality screen on this one is quite sufficient for
seeing what's on it and deleting junk, if one wants, to save disk space.
And it understands my Canon RAW files. Not really good enough to show
off your images at anything near their best. I think the Epson P-5000 is
the one with the best display quality.
I've carried it on a couple of trips and it has performed flawlessly. I
haven't used it as my only storage, but rather as alternate/back-up
storage, carried separately from my modest size/weight laptop. I want
the laptop anyway for internet access.
The storage in these all these things is simply 2.5" laptop type hard
drives. People say they have upgraded this model to 120 GB and I'll bet
a little research will find out which other, similar products can be
unofficially upgraded to larger drives.
Moose
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