Portable Hard Drive With Card Reader, Anyone Using Them?? Need Suggestions.

I will be traveling overseas for vacation in the near future and there will be lots of picture taking. I am looking for a hard drive with CF readers where I can just take it with me and when my CF card is full and just DL it into the hard drive. I saw some at Fry's and online. Some sell just the enclosures and some the whole package. They are also battery operated. I am wondering if anyone is using such device or have any experiences with them. Any suggestions or help is much appreciated. Thank you.

Here are some found on eBay

I have been using the Jobo GIGA one for around six months now.
Around £95 GBP and is so easy to use .... i am currently developing great confidence in the 40 GB storage device.
A superb addition to the bag.
cheers, d

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Thank you for your suggestion. I will look into that. I guess not alot of people use this type of device....

I went to Eurpoe for a month in June and I took one 40 gig similar to the above picture.
Make sure you get one where you can recharge the batteries.
Downloading a 1gig CF card to the portable drive took minutes only.
Then when you get home, use the usb connection on the portable hard drive to your pc....
Rgds
Patrick

Hi Watchcaddy,
I'm currently using a Hyperdrive HD80. A few people I work with have researched this and have found it to be one of the fastest in terms of downloading CF cards. To give you an idea, I can download my 8gig Sandisk Ultra II with 3.5 gigs of photos onto this device in approximately 4.5 minutes. Thats pretty quick in terms of downloading. I find the biggest complaint with other devices is that the cards take too long to download and the device goes through batteries really quick. The HD80 claims that it can download approx 80Gigs of data on a single charge. The unit I bought was the enclosure, and I bought the hard drive separately locally (80Gig notebook drive). I've only had this for a month, and it really works great. I shoot weddings and I download my cards to this when my CF cards fill up. And, as a backup, I also download to my MacBook Pro. Here's a link to the site where I bought it:
http://hyperdrive.com/​shop/index.php
I really mean it when I say that this thing downloads fast! I haven't come across anything this fast. Only downside is that the unit cannot display the photos you take.
Hope this helps. Email me if you have any more questions.

That Hyperdrive is one interesting-looking unit. I really like how it runs off of 4 AA batteries, which you can pretty much find anywhere in the world.

I use a Hyperdrive too - and, as above, it was the speed of the thing that attracted me (and the price I guess). Never had a problem with it.

I have a 80Gb Wolverine Flashpac and love it.

I am in a similar situation -- will be traveling for about 3 weeks and need storage, laptop not an option -- and am looking into devices like this as well. I don't feel like I need the fancy display screen of the Epson P2000 except to make sure the photos came through okay before I clear my CF card. Does the Jobo (or similar cheaper/no LCD devices) have a way (that you can trust) of confirming that the transfer was successful? Or have people who use these devices not had a problem with transfers being incomplete or corrupted? Maybe I'm just paranoid but I hesitate to trust a hard drive too much while on safari.

Thanks.

There's also the Epson P2000/P4000 but they're very pricey.

So how long will those 4 AA batteries will last you on the Hyperdrive? I was researching on 80Gb Wolverine Flashpac and it uses Li-ion battery and it can only last UP to 6GB of transfer?! Anyone can shed some light on the battery life? Thank you.

Someone here did an experiment on the FlashPac a while back and found one full battery charge could transfer almost 9Gb of photos.
I shoot raw and 4Gb of CF give me about 430 photos which i hardly reached each day. When traveling, I downloaded photos from my CF to the FlashPac every night when i was in the hotel. So it is not a problem.
You don't have to worry about the 6Gb per charge limit(conservative estimate) unless you shoot more than 600 raw images a day and your camera is 1DsMii.

Aside from a laptop, is there a reader that will also write to a CD after DLing? Has anyone come across such a device?

I have seen a ad for that, I just need to find it....

I will post it after I find it.

awesome, thanks!