40D & external USB drive?

I've got a 40D. Can I plug an external USB disk drive directly into the camera's USB port and offload images to it? I'm thinking of getting something like a WD Passport.

Not sure if you can plug directly to the external drive. I have one, my pics go to the external via EOS Utility on the computer. Have had no trouble yet and beats clogging up the internal drives.

Nope.

That would be pretty sweet though.

If you add the WFT-E3 (or WFT-E3A if you are in the US) accessory to the 40D, then you can do what you ask for.
It's not cheap, but it works.

Qurlyjoe wrote in post #8011656
I've got a 40D. Can I plug an external USB disk drive directly into the camera's USB port and offload images to it? I'm thinking of getting something like a WD Passport.

You'd need a device that has the proper drivers to do that. I'm not sure if anything is on the market that is smaller than a small laptop but has drivers for directly connecting a camera, but there are devices with card readers that are smaller than laptops. I have an Epson P-5000 which has CF and SD card slots and has, I believe, an 80GB hard drive and can process photos, video and music (it makes for a large MP3 player on road trips).

Unfortunately, it's not USB 2.0, I believe, which makes for slow downloads, so I typically have my laptop around, but in a pinch, like out in the woods, the Epson can come in handy when needed (it has a pretty strong battery life).

The reason for this is of course that the camera's USB port isn't a host port. That's the difference when it comes to the WFT-E3, as that thing has a host port.

I've got an old digital vault thingy that works, but is very slow (USB 1). That wasn't so bad with 256MB cards, but with 4GB cards and bigger, it takes forever to copy the images. I was hoping one of these drives would do the trick faster. That WFT-E3A looks cool, but yes, it is pricy.

I guess I'll just have to keep lugging the laptop around.

Thanks for the replies, folks.