Portable Hard Drive

<p>I am in the planning mode for a trip to the Grand Canyon this next spring. I can of course buy several SD cards (I have a Nikon d90) but I am wondering about a portable hard drive that will read the card and store the photos without the use of a computer. I want to avoid bringing a computer with me.<br>

Any suggestions?<br>

Thank you in advance for reading and answering if you do have an opinion,<br>

phil b<br>

benton, ky</p>

<p>I've been looking for one of these for a trip I'm taking to Italy next year. I think I'm going to go with the 40gb Epson P-3000. It's not that cheap ($350 at amazon.com), but it's gotten a lot of good reviews. Also with it being able to play back the pictures, including RAW files, the people I'm going with can check out the pictures with out having to handle and pass around my camera. Hope this helps.</p>

<h1 ><br /> </h1>

<p>The only issue I see with these devices is the capacity and inability to back up your work--burn DVD's or transfer to another HD.</p>

<p>I just finished a 32 day trip and came back with 200gb's of files. I carried a couple of 250gb hard drives with me, with the computer, and bought a 2tb while on the road. I was close enough after 2-1/2 weeks that I was worried I would run out of space. So, I guess back up and capacity are issues each has to deal with, but I do agree it is a pain to drag around your PC everywhere. On the other hand, I use mine almost every day in any case, so it would come along regardless. </p>

<p>Backpacking would be another story, to be sure.</p>

<p>Hi Phil, I was going to suggest the same as Bryan. Get one of the Epson P devices. If you're going to shoot RAW, you'll want either the 6000 or 7000 unit. If you just shoot JPEG, in any resolution and size, the 3000 should have plenty of space. I will likely get one of these for my next trip.<br>

If you have time, hit Bryce and Zion. Neither are too far a drive if you're at the north rim.<br>

Mark</p>

<p>I use a Hyperdrive Space. The lcd only display controls for the device, you won't be able to preview your shots. I use it when I'm shooting for a few days out in the field without computer support. Relatively inexpensive.</p>

<p>Regards,<br>

Alvin</p>

<p>I bring a laptop onto which I store all my shots. 40GB would not be enough space for me on a trip to Italy. But I know some of the Epson you can actually exchange the HD on for a larger one.</p>

<p>$350 for a Epson image tank seems a lot of money to me. I think you can better buy a Netbook and a usb HDD. Now you can make a backup and you have a nice screen to look to your pics.</p>

<p>Do a search for card reader hdd, I saw a 250 gb for $169 at Adorama. <br>

http://www.adorama.com/DFPS2250G.html?emailquote=Y</p>

<p>I would agree with Alvin, the Hyperdrives, for backup-only are a much better value than the Epson units, as the latter have more "consumer" features, such as preview, playback, etc...that you do not need if you JUST want to back-up. MS</p>

<p>SD cards are relatively cheap, take very little space and are less likely to fail if dropped. I would trust several 16 gig cards before I would trust a 250 gig drive. Of course, even on a once-in-a-lifetime trip I rough edit as I go. I can't imagine any trip where I would shoot more that 40 gigs of photos--even shooting raw.</p>

<p>40GB wouldn't nearly be enough space for me - I filled 60GB on a recent 1 week trip in the Eastern Sierra and to the air show in Miramar. Would have been more than 80GB, had I not missed the air show in San Francisco.<br>

To me, these Epson viewers are way overpriced. The 160GB version costs $725! For that amount, I can purchase a netbook (that is usable for other things as well) and two 320 GB notebook drives; I would then have more space and two backups instead of one. OK, the size of a netbook and two drives is 2-3x that of an Epson viewer - but it is also 2-3x as useful.<br>

Any backup device that does not allow to view the images afterwards is useless to me - I would not delete the images from my CF cards if I wasn't certain that I have them backed up safely.<br>

When I started with digital, I purchased two of those card-reading hard drive enclosures. Not only is their capacity too low, they also turned out to be battery hogs and work very slow - copying one 4GB card would almost completely drain the battery.</p>

<p>I agree with Dieter - for the cost of one of the Epson devices you could get a Netbook and two portable 320 GB HDD's. You could probably even do some editing with the Netbook although I imagine the speed would be painful. On the other hand the Netbook has a much larger screen for viewing your images than the little Epson devices.</p>

<p>HLA</p>

<p>i'm using an acer aspire one netbook to type this... it's got a 160gb HDD, SD card slots, and i connect a portable USB drive to it. (my cameras take CF cards, so i carry a reader, too.) it works well for me in a travel situation, although i wouldn't want to carry it all the time. it's waaaaay cheaper than those epson devices, and pretty small and light, considering. i use ViewNX for reviewing (and weeding out) RAW images, but it honestly isn't up to the task of editing. if you really don't want to carry a computer, however, just stick with your SD cards.</p>

<p>Keep in mind that this takes older IDE drives, but it is a low cost solution:</p>

<p>"http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=PB40-NHD&cat=CSE"</p>

<p>You can find, up to 320gb IDE drives.</p>

<p>I used to have a hyperdrive, and man do I miss that thing. I highly reccomend them. If I hadn't destroyed the connection swapping out hard drives, it would be still in service today.</p>

<p>On my trip to Canada I took along a Nextodi Extreme drive. <a href="http://www.nextodi.com/en/product/eXtreme_en.html">http://www.nextodi.com/en/product/eXtreme_en.html</a></p>

<p>It doesn´t have a screen, which I didn´t need since my D700's screen is great anyway, but has a LCD screen that gives you all the info that you need. Furthermore, it can be bought in several capacity sizes. Trust me, 40 gb is nothing in terms of size. If you're a fanatic, you will fill that up in short time, and then what?</p>

<p>You can even choose to fit in any 2,5" HDD. And yes, that includes a Solid State drive if you want the safest option. It connects with your PC using USB2 or eSata - for serious speed, and has a multi-slot entry.<br />It worked flawlessly!</p>

<p>I spent several hours surfing on the web for a decent memory tank, and I believe this is a very good deal.</p>

<p>The Sanho Hyperdrives are fantastic! I have a Hyperdrive Colorspace with an 80gb hard drive in it and I love it. I took it to Alaska for a 2 week trip and backed up my cards, my wife's cards, my inlaw's cards, and my dad's video and it worked flawlessly. The battery life on these units is far better than any other drive out there and I'm getting 15mb per second transfer speed with CF cards and about the same with SD cards. The Colorspace will transfer 120gb per charge while other units will only transfer 5 or 10 gigs. I have no complaints about the hyperdrive and you can always upgrade the hard drive if you want to--all of the programming is on the circuit board. I'm sure they have newer models, but the Colorspace has a preview and will read raw files so you can double check that the transfer is successful. A little known feature with these units is that you can verify your cards authenticity and fix bad sectors on the card with built in utilities.<br>

One other thing I almost forgot--the battery is replaceable and is an easy to find 7.2v lithium battery in case you ever wear it out.</p>

 

<p>This is an area that I've done a lot of trial and error on over the years. I agree that carrying along a laptop is inconvenient (and doesn't have the storage space of a lot of the portable/handheld hard drive viewers if you don't also carry portable hard drives). If you plan to do some editing (other than deleting) on the go then by all means, a laptop is essential, but if not why take it.<br>

A few years back I bought an Epson P-3000. I loved it at first, but then it failed on me (of course, this is possible with any hard drive, but it was enough for me to get rid of it, especially because as others have noted, it is way over priced compared to the competition). Some might say that there isn't any competition. Certainly the Epson seems to have the best screen but the screen on the Hyperdrive Colorsapce UDMA isn't bad at all and quite sufficient for checking photos and deleting obvious rejects on the fly. It's also faster than the Epson (at least the P-3000 series) at downloading images. And it works with raw images. Price wise the two aren't even close, which brings me to my next point.<br>

I've lost images in the past from an entire trip and now I do all I can so it won't happen again. So for about the price of one Epson I can get two of the Colorspace units and keep one in my suitcase and one in my backpack just to be safe. I also keep a copy of everything on multiple 16 gig memory cards. As for worrying about running out of space, this is another area where the HyperDrive (and other units like the Joba) have the Epson beat. I believe that the Epsons only go up to 120 gigs whereas the others come in 500 gig sizes. I don't think I would ever need much more than 120 gigs for one trip but you never know.<br>

Bottom line, if I had money to burn and only needed up to 120 gigs, the Epson is probably the best unit, but for much less money I can get the faster downloading Colorspace HyperDrive UDMA which has a nice color screen to preview and edit raw images.</p>

<p>Get one of these minilaptops and then a USB-powered portable external hard drive. This way you can verify that nothing has gone wrong with the photography and make a backup on the external drive. If you rely on a single hard drive for storage without having either a flash card backup (SD in your case) or a second hard drive, you're inviting massive disaster. Hard drives have problems and you could lose all your work in an instant if you keep just one copy.</p>

<p>Just returned from three weeks in London, Israel and Amsterdam and used my Acer Aspire One for the first time. Solved all my portable storage problems and was able to view them on a decent screen. The downside? Although small, the AAO was a bit heavier and took up more space than expected in my backpack (I never put equipment in checked luggage). Much less than a laptop but still.... Also had to bring a card reader to download the cards. Then again, the AAO allowed for Internet connectivity. </p>

<p>The Hyperdrives that Zach and John referred to seem like a good option. Card reader and storage in a contained unit. I may have to check them out before my next trip. </p>

<p>I'd say if Internet connectivity is important, get a netbook. If you don't care about getting online, go for the Hyperdrives. </p>

 

<p>For $350, you can buy a light, portable ePC with 8 hr battery life and a 300G Hdisk for photo storage. Side benefit: you can use it for your email, browsing, and uploading photos to backup storage. It even runs you favorite image catalog and manipulation software. Downside is a small screen.<br>

John</p>

<p>John H -- I definitely agree that netbooks are much more flexible but as I said, they are also heavier and bigger. It's all relative of course, just something to consider when packing an already full load. </p>

<p>I use both a netbook (Acer Aspire One) and a Wolverine MVP (120GB).<br>

The Wolverine allows me to backup CF, SD and xD cards and acts as a USB drive as well.It is about the size of narrow paper back book.<br>

The netbook with an external DVD burner is used to browse and perform light editing of images and to burn DVDs of images. The DVDs are my backup of what is on the Wolverine and Netbook.<br>

It is possible to do light editing using Picasa 3 on my netbook. (It handles my RAW images and JPGs just fine.)<br>

The netbook with an extended battery and external DVD drive cost me about $350 US.<br>

Have fun.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Another vote here for the netbook & portable HDD strategy.</p>

<p>I did the "trip of a lifetime" this year - 15 days from San Fransico - G Canyon - Vegas then home.</p>

<p>I used my daughters netbook (acer Aspire one) which has a 120gb HDD. Took a card reader and each night backup up to the netbook hdd and then to a small and compact portable hdd Western digital 320gb. Both are small and easily manageable compared to the two bodies, 6 lenses and other "stuff" I carried in my backpack.</p>

<p>I took 8,000 raw images (betweeen 8gb and 13gb each). All worked fine save for about 30 images I lost taken from top of Hoover Dam. I can only guess I screwed up the data transfer. So TAKE great CARE when you are backing this all up at night in the hotel room. Preferable to do this BEFORE the bottle of wine is empty....!</p>

<p>As others said benefit of Netbook is internet access, "big" screen to review pics on, and you could do it for $400 at todays prices - much more flexible than a 40gb dedicated machine.</p>

<p>good luck - let us know your decision....</p>

<p>james</p>

<p>Since many years I'm testing different portable hard drives. There are so many models and types.<br /> The really best are the hyperdrives. But even at the hyperdrives there are big differences!<br /> The only two I can advice are: "Hyperdrive Space". with 320 GB space. One akku charge will give you the possibility of a download for 120 GB! Switch of the download control and set speed on "hyper"! <br /> I use it since 3 years now and it saved me more than 200'000 photos! <br /> Downloadspedd 2 GB from a CF card 2minutes.<br /> The second I can advice is "Hyperdrive SpaceUDMA", the new one. <br /> It is the modell with a color display, where you can watch your photos. <br /> The downloadspeed of 2GB is only 1 minute from a CF card!<br /> I Advice the Hyperdrive Space UDMA with 500GB hard drive.<br /> The most vallue ist definetly the Hyperdrie Space!<br /> I sold more than 380 of that portable harddrive without any bad report!<br>

<br /> Dionys</p>