Cheap Portable Storage

The ebay listing says Hard Drives up to 80 gb. Does anyone know any reason that I could not put in a 160?

There may be FAT32 limitations... Dunno. If that's the case, partition it... You might only be able to use the other partitions as a HDD, not for the reader part.

HDDs are cheap as heckhese days... but maybe an 80 wil do me.. I need to think it thru.. one of these is definitely in the works tho. Thanks DN.

Double Negative wrote in post #3100718
I've been using mine for about a week now, with CF cards and a Mac, via USB also. It works as advertised! I have no complaints about the device and it works well.I had a freebie 40GB laptop drive, so the overall cost was $16.99 + shipping. EXACTLY what I needed to dump cards!

Which one did you get? Link? What capacity CF cards to you use? The main reason I returned the $100 SmartDisk 40GB photobank is coz it just freezes after reading 20% of a 4GB card. But it seems to read 2GB cards just fine.

I do have a SmartDisk Fotochute 20GB and it will read a 4GB card in about 30min via a card reader and it will do about 2 cards on a single charge. Thats more than enough for me (for now).

Richard_Miami wrote in post #3101547
The ebay listing says Hard Drives up to 80 gb. Does anyone know any reason that I could not put in a 160?

You should be able to go to 120. Make sure you get the right interface. Laptop drives are moving from PATA to SATA. I'm not aware of PATA drives over 120 and there is a 137 GB limit in certain versions of the PATA protocol.

gjman wrote in post #3101742
Which one did you get? Link? What capacity CF cards to you use? The main reason I returned the $100 SmartDisk 40GB photobank is coz it just freezes after reading 20% of a 4GB card. But it seems to read 2GB cards just fine.

I do have a SmartDisk Fotochute 20GB and it will read a 4GB card in about 30min via a card reader and it will do about 2 cards on a single charge. Thats more than enough for me (for now).

I got the one linked to earlier, without the drive.

I use 4GB SanDisk Extreme III cards and so far have had no freezes - whatever's on the card is read to completion. It works well as an external HDD and even card reader when attached via USB.

It seems to read cards at a reasonable clip but I haven't looked at it scientifically - how long it takes to copy X amount of data and how long the batteries last in doing so... They claim two hours battery life. You can run it and/or charge it via the supplied charger or USB cable.

does it use an EIDE or SATA drive?

hotmonkeyac wrote in post #3110342
does it use an EIDE or SATA drive?

eide, of course.

I bought one of these cases off of EBay and an 80gb drive from Newegg. Set it up and formated the drive with swissknife. Works like a champ. It transferred 8gb (off a Sandisk Extreme III 12gb card) on a charge.

vondo wrote in post #3101854
You should be able to go to 120.

Not necessarily. It's likely a limitation of the firmware rather than the interface. If anyone has access to a drive larger than 80GB, I'd be interested to hear if this thing works with it. Does anyone find the transfer speed slow?

gjman wrote in post #2997709
Holy el carpo...this thing looks EXACTLY like the SmartDisk PhotoBank. The same layout for the SD/CF cards and on/off and copy buttons. How much does one of these cost in American money.

I'm almost certain it is the same product. It's quite normal for ODMs in China to design a reference platform with specs for PCB size, LCD pinouts, jack locations, etc. They then go and sell the designs or even manufacture the exact same design but with different plastics. If you're having problems with one brand, it's likely to occur with the other because everything will be the same except for the exterior plastic design.

If you are shooting professionally, I would look for quality at a good price. Memory cards are getting cheaper and cheaper and I would not trust my images to that item. I am looking for a portable hard drive and will purchase a G Technology drive in the next week or two. My second option is an Epson P-3000 which is a very nice option with 80GB? of storage. I do not have money to burn, but you get what you pay for.

why would you not trust them to this but you would to the epson, a hard drive is a hard drive its that simple, once the image copies there its the same thing

I agree that this may not be as good as the epson but the risk of data loss vs the epson is the same once they are there. This copies the files so if it fails during the copy you will know anyway.

I agree with Tekkie. In fact you can choose the hard disk that is inside, so you can buy a good brand (Seagate, Western Digital) and be even safer. You are not stuck with whatever they think is a good hard disk in the Epson.

I agree with tekkie and erpetao... There's really no difference between this unit and an Epson, for example. Pick a good hard drive and go for it.

Of course hard drives aren't as robust as flash RAM - but for $16.99 (plus drive) vs. $220 for a 4GB CF card, guess which one I'm going with? I have several CF cards for redundancy and capacity in the field - but at the end of the day, I dump them and re-use them the following day. Better than schlepping a 17" laptop around for the same purpose.