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Gear / Technical Help => Photo / Video Recording => Topic started by: Brian Skalinder on August 23, 2008, 09:02:36 PM
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Taking a 3 week vacation end-Sep to mid-Oct, and starting to look at standalone digital photo storage solutions. My general requirements:
- >= 80 GB
- SDHC support natively (no adapters)
- Just storage, don't need image viewing screen
- Transfer verification
- Fast transfer speed nice, but not critical
- Long battery life nice, but not critical
- Not a completely dufus interface
So far, I'm looking at (in no particular order):
- Sanho Hyperdrive Space 80 GB (~$240)
- Wolverine Flashpac 80 GB (~$150 - not including MIR, which I never count on receiving, anyway)
- Digital Foci Photo Safe II 80 GB (~$140)
- Nexto ND-2325 (~$190)
I'm seeing generally good user reviews for the Nexto and Sanho, not much info on Digital Foci, and mixed reviews of the Wolverine. Any recommendations from fellow TSers?
Alternatively, I'm also considering picking up a handful of 8 GB SD cards and foregoing the standalone HDD storage option, but am concerned I might not have enough space.
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Well, quite honestly since you haven't needed one of these devices YET, do you think you will be using it after your trip? Maybe yes but probably not. I would forgo spending as much as $240 on one of these and getting a few SD/CF cards because you will be able to use them later on or at least sell them and get some money back.
Just the thoughts of mine.
peace,
sean
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Well, quite honestly since you haven't needed one of these devices YET, do you think you will be using it after your trip? Maybe yes but probably not. I would forgo spending as much as $240 on one of these and getting a few SD/CF cards because you will be able to use them later on or at least sell them and get some money back.
Thanks for your thoughts, Sean.
I haven't needed greater portable storage capacity yet because I haven't yet taken a long vacation with my new camera. The only time I'll ever use it: on vacations like this one, about once a year. I won't really use the either an HDD device or extra SD cards more than about once a year. I like your idea of selling the SD cards shortly after vacation to recover some of my cost. I could then buy newer, faster, higher capacity SD cards before my vacation next year, and then repeat every year's vacation. Buy, use, re-sell, upgrade next round. I'm just a little paranoid about <1> insufficient capacity, and <2> data loss.
Now that I do the math on capacity, I could probably get by just fine with SD cards. Picking up ~6 Sandisk Class 6 8GB SD cards for ~$240, plus the two I already have, at ~500 RAW images per card, would yield ~5,000 pics. Though, my composition still stinks, so I do take a lot more pics than necessary. But that's an awful lot of pictures! No way I'll take that many.
As for data loss, in some respects SD cards are safer - if one card goes bad, I only lose one card of data v. losing all the data on the HDD at once. Hmmmm...leaning towards more SD cards, now, and probably 4 more would do the trick. Gonna have to ponder this further...
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why not carry the laptop with you on the trip and offload to it? What I do on all my location trips that are more than one day. The plus is that I can also view the images on a larger screen than the camera lcd and get an idea of what images I want to do what to and sometimes to some simple batch processing. Only time I don't take the lapper is on backpacking trips. In those cases, I just bring extra cf cards.
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why not carry the laptop with you on the trip and offload to it?
Trying to travel as light as possible, that's all. My old T40 isn't huge and heavy, as far as laptops go, but it isn't small and light, either. At this point, I'll probably grab a few more SD cards and leave it at that.
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why not carry the laptop with you on the trip and offload to it?
Trying to travel as light as possible, that's all. My old T40 isn't huge and heavy, as far as laptops go, but it isn't small and light, either. At this point, I'll probably grab a few more SD cards and leave it at that.
gotcha. You will be surpised. 20g of cards and you will be good for a long time of shooting.
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I like your idea of selling the SD cards shortly after vacation to recover some of my cost.
That's right! I'll buy a couple off of ya too.
-sean