2.5in USB Digital Camera Buddy

[gingerneil]

Anyone bought one of these
Any ideas on transfer rates, and volume per charge ?

http://www.usbtech.co.uk/catalog/product_info.php/cPath/17/products_id/203?osCsid=d9e328cbd8af0ce9633906b251a512db

[PostShawn]

I bought one on ebay. It wasn't that brand but was the exact same thing. I was supposed to be able to just plug in a hard drive to it, format and go. But it didn't want to work. The hard drive is a brand new Toshiba 80gb so it should work just fine. The unit though felt like junk. Was ultra light and just didn't feel like there was a single quality part on it.

I then picked up one of these http://www.digitalfoci.com/media_buddy.html with a 80gb already installed and it has been great. It works with my 1gb SanDisk Ultra II and a 512mb Ritek card but not my 512mb SanDisk card. Both 512mb cards of mine are a few years old though. They have been used with a palm device before I got the camera. So I would think anything newer for memory should work pretty good. I am very happy with this unit. I took a week long trip and put 8 gigs in it from my camera and my friends Nikon point and shoot with a SD card and it worked well with both.

Good luck,
-Shawn

[FlashZebra]

Also keep in mind that you can get a good quality 4GB Compact Flash card now for about $75.00 and an 8GB card for about $130.00.

This means that these temporary storage devices are making less and less sense to even own. When flash memory prices were a lot higher, they were definitely a necessary. This is far less true now.

Many (most) photographers could now get by with 12 or 16GB of storage directly on Compact Flash cards, even for extended trips, and the cost would not be much more than one of these hard drive based temporary storage units.

In the post above the user could have just used an 8GB card and never had to bother with downloads to a temporary storage device.

Enjoy! Lon

[Tdragone]

I bought one on ebay. It wasn't that brand but was the exact same thing. I was supposed to be able to just plug in a hard drive to it, format and go. But it didn't want to work. The hard drive is a brand new Toshiba 80gb so it should work just fine.

It was probably formatted as NFTS (Windows will not format anything over ~ 30 or 40 gigs as fat32) You must do it through a 3rd party app or via DOS boot disk.

But that doesn't matter to you since you bought a second unit. I'm posting this more for others who might stumble on this post in the future..

-Tom D.
(I discovered this with my 2 digimate portable hdd's)