Comments on: Portable photo storage buyer’s guide

By: Fraser

Fraser — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 00:12:15 +0000

The Nexto is the best portable hard drive I’ve found:

http://www.jaldigital.com.au/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=27_106&products_id=380

- whatever size drive you like
- 1 Gb transfer in less than a minute
- accesory battery increases life to at least 80Gb worth of transfers

I use two and do a double backup of every card as they come out of the camera. They do slow down a bit if they are really loaded up, but for a professional shooting loads of data, these are perfect.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 08:04:26 +0000

If you need speed, reliability and quality for your money, then go with compactdrive. I’ve been using the PD70x with a Nikon D70s and a D200 for half a year now. no complaints, great performance (around 40 Gb transfer with a set of batteries). The newer version seems to be even better!

By: Charles

Charles — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 00:04:34 +0000

I’d like to recomend the Iaudio X5 L. It’s mostly an MP3 player but has USB on-the-go capability and links to my card reader and camera allowing me to upload images and view them, not to mention the 35 hour battery life.

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 20:11:00 +0000

I think one key criteria left out is speed! I went with the PD70x because it will dump 1 gig of pics in less then 2 minutes usually. When I’m out and about, I just want to shoot and keep shooting! By keeping the hd in a padded pocket on my chest i can slip the card into the HD and a 2nd card into the camera and just keep swapping them as needed without any delay. Last week I shot 9gigs of pics in 1 day, and it worked perfectly! If I wanted to see the pics, I stuck the card in my PDA and used PocketLoupe, but for the most part, I am not looking for a portable media player, just a fast storage dump. Also having rechargeable AA’s is a major plus too. I use energizer 2500’s and I can go through about 50-80 gigs before I change them.

By: Steve

Steve — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 18:45:02 +0000

I would remove the Coolwalker since it is no longer available from Nikon new.

I would add near the top of the list the JOBO GVP040 Giga Vu Pro (40GB). It’s features are equivalent to the EPSON P-4500 and the reviews state the card transfer rate is much faster than the Epson.

By: Alb

Alb — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 12:59:33 +0000

I’m with Stew on just burning to CD/DVD. Unless you’re really in the middle of nowhere you’ll usually find a net cafe that will let you dump the contents of your mem card to an optical disk, and you can even get a duplicate copy and verify that they’re all on there yourself on a PC before you leave. This is what I’ve done on every trip.

By: Stew

Stew — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 14:05:26 +0000

I just came back from 2 weeks in Utah’s national parks where I took tons of photos. I simply got my wife’s and my SD cards (about 1.5 Gb) burned to a DVD while on vacation for $19. I made sure the photos looked good on the disk before paying for it. Yes, having my own device would have been handier, but I’m not sure I’d totally trust a unit that didn’t have a viewscreen. And I’m not at the point of spending $200-300 for something that does.

I also tried uploading my shots to a network storage website, but that was too darn slow from my hotel’s public PC.

By: Renato

Renato — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 15:50:57 +0000

Wolverine is not a brand per se, they simply rebadge Vosonic products.
For me Vosonic was the best, PD70X looked too heavy for me.

By: Cyrus

Cyrus — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 23:35:51 +0000

I would also like to throw the Hyperdrive portable storage device into the hat. I ordered one in March, took delivery about a month later, and last month, brought it with me on my weeklong fishing trip to Alaska. It’s not very sexy (no LCD screen to view photos), but very functional — transfer rates are quite fast and the battery life is very good. I didn’t bring a charger, and it transferred all of my photos (about 20 GB worth).

By: Oscar

Oscar — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 20:01:42 +0000

Back in march I purchased this unit (four-in-one digital media drive) by RIDATA I would recommend it but it is not 100% portable.
Here is what it is, Flash Memory to CD Burner, Digital Media Player, Multi-Card Reader/Writer and External CD-R/RW writer and it reads just about any memory card.

It dose not run on batteries so have to make sure that 120V is available.
I went on a cruise and downloaded my pictures on CD and by that I was able to free my 2GB SD Card and take more pictures like crazy.

Here is were I purchased it might be discontinued but many other units are available.

http://www.mydigitaldiscount.com