Portable storage strategies when travelling

[alex_medeiros]

I am giving thought to purchasing an 80 Gig (or two) portable hard drives and

taking along my card reader on a three week trip to Europe. My hope would be

to either take advantage of PC's that are set up for guests use in hotels or

find internet cafes where I could hook up the card reader and hard drive to

transfer files. Another idea would be to see if camera/processing stores

would put the images on my hard drives for a fee. While I am taking 12 Gigs

worth of flash cards, I am pretty confident I will more than fill these up as

I shoot raw with my 5D. The hard drives also would give me back-ups. I could

get a portable storage device but I have not been able to find anything that I

am really interested in other than the Epson devices which are a little pricey

and I am kind of holding out for their expected upgrade. I am also a little

concerned that most of these devices use rechargeable batteries and the

different electrical specs in different countries. The hard drives are powere

through their USB connections. I would like to avoid taking a laptop. The 80

Gig hard drives (either Western Digital or Seagate) run about $100. While I

could just purchase more flash cards this doesn't provide a back-up.

Thank you in advance for any thoughts and suggestions you may have.

[elektrik]

I believe this is the only model I've seen that uses AA batteries. This certainly fits the bill for me. Jobo makes competing versions, but they get less copying/charge and don't have the file verification.

 

http://www.adorama.com/ICDHD8080.html

 

The maker also sells just the box (in addition to models with other capacities), so you can order whatever 2.5" HD you want to go in it.

 

matt

[elektrik]

Whoops, just saw the other thread discussing the same thing.

 

http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=00Hq19&tag=

 

Sorry! :)

[marc_van_lommel]

I just bought this vosonic, http://www.vosonic.com/index.php?PA=product&id=26&kind_id=4 , portable USB card reader, HD.

It runs on batteries too.

Had it with me on a short 4 day trip and it worked well. I had 5 GB SD, CF and xD mem with me but still had to copy it to the device because I just shot so many pics ... the good thing about ... the HD is changeable and the battery is recharge Li-ion ... the downside, there is no LCD display to view the images, only to see the progress of the copying ...

[lheusinkveld]

"different electrical specs in different countries"

I have the Epson P2000, and like most (but not all) modern portable electrial items it accepts different voltages. All you need is a converter plug.

[szrimaging]

I highly reccomend the Hyperdrives. I have one, and just took it to Flordia. Not a single problem, just keep spare batteries handy. Best part of these, if you HD ever fails, you can just replace the drive with another, instead of having to buy another unit. And it is super super easy.