New hard drive in storage device?

jerry12953

jerry12953

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Jeremy Moore
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A few years ago I thought a Canon M30 storage device would be a good idea. I think I more or less used it once and that was that.

I tried using it again earlier this year and it was excruciatingly, mind-bogglingly, unusably slow to upload images to it.

Then it occurred to me I might just be able to put a quicker hard drive in.

Any thoughts?
 
Depends on the internals of the storage device. Could be ide / sata or Canon may have used their own propriety hard drive connection method.

Can't find any info online, so probably best to open it and have a look.
 
I'd be surprised if it's really the hard drive that's the bottle neck here. More likely it's the card reader or USB connection, whichever you're using to upload files to the device.

Personally I think that you'd be throwing good money after bad by swapping the drive. Today there are better ways to address the problems that the M30 was designed to solve. For example you could get yourself an Eye Fi card and stream all of your photos to your computer or iThingy instead.
 
munkee said:
I'd be surprised if it's really the hard drive that's the bottle neck here. More likely it's the card reader or USB connection, whichever you're using to upload files to the device.

Personally I think that you'd be throwing good money after bad by swapping the drive. Today there are better ways to address the problems that the M30 was designed to solve. For example you could get yourself an Eye Fi card and stream all of your photos to your computer or iThingy instead.
Click to expand...

The cards slots directly into the unit - would that rule out the card reader?

At the time it seemed like a good solution to the problem of storing/ backing up images while on a long trip away from home, and to begin the editing process -without the weight and bulk of a laptop.

I'll have to look into the Eye Fi card etc.
 
As I understand it it has a USB 2.0 socket and a built-in card reader. I don't know this as fact but the card reader probably also uses the USB plumbing internally. USB 2.0 is considerably slower than most hard drives produced in the last few years.

I dare say that the M30 was a good solution in its day but technology has moved on somewhat since its introduction. If you don't want to lug a laptop about then consider using an iPad or iPod Touch instead.
 
munkee said:
As I understand it it has a USB 2.0 socket and a built-in card reader. I don't know this as fact but the card reader probably also uses the USB plumbing internally. USB 2.0 is considerably slower than most hard drives produced in the last few years.

I dare say that the M30 was a good solution in its day but technology has moved on somewhat since its introduction. If you don't want to lug a laptop about then consider using an iPad or iPod Touch instead.
Click to expand...

Cheers.(y)
 
With an iPad another option would be to buy the camera connection kit but its expensive and arguably not as elegant as the wireless option.
 
jerry12953 said:
A few years ago I thought a Canon M30 storage device would be a good idea. I think I more or less used it once and that was that.

I tried using it again earlier this year and it was excruciatingly, mind-bogglingly, unusably slow to upload images to it.

Then it occurred to me I might just be able to put a quicker hard drive in.

Any thoughts?
Click to expand...

The M30 was a steaming pile of wombat's poo that Canon should be highly ashamed of. It was much, much slower than any competing product at the time and is stupendously slow compared to modern devices.

No, the bottleneck isn't the drive - it's the crappy CF-HD interface that Canon stuck in there. I wouldn't be surprised if it were USB-1, except that I'd expect it to be faster if it were. Canon spec it at 4 MB/s - that's around 15% the speed of USB2.

The hard drive is a 1.8" 4200rpm unit. So essentially irrepaceable.

My recommendation - keep it for a few years, taking it out every now and then as a reminder to research purchases a bit more throroughly in the future.

An iPad is a stupid idea for backing up. Instead of backing up to a 64GB tablet why not just buy a 64GB card?
 
jerry12953 said:
I can see the advantages of an ipad.

But I'm a bit of a dumbo when it comes to technology.

How would the process of storage/backing up be with an ipad?

Can you plug a card into one?

(Stop sniggering at the back there........:nono:)
Click to expand...

Not without the camera kit or a third party equivalent. You might want to consider an Android tablet, many of which have USB ports and card readers built-in.
 
A tablet connect via FTP to home server (ON 24/7) or large cloud storage service is the only ipad way to do it (via 3rd party apps / services). This will require a nice data package on a mobile device, and very decent connection.
Or a small laptop with large / external HDD is simpler.
 
OK, so I was stupid gullible so and so to buy one.......

But it's not just for back-up. It's so that I can start editing the pictures down while on the go. No software involved obviously......

I'll make a note of the apotop card reader. One day I might go down the ipad route.

Thanks very much for the suggestions. Genuinely very helpful.
 
I could argue either way. Personally I'd go the Eye Fi route and upload files to my laptop whenever it's in range.
 
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