Portable hard drive

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BeeJayEff

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Bernard
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I have a 700GB portable hard drive (Freecom SSD) which I like to take on holiday with me so that I can empty cards onto it from time to time. Its only external connection is a mini-USB socket, so unfortunately it means finding a PC to plug it and the camera into before copying files. That's OK if you're in a city with internet cafes, or a hotel with a PC, but that ain't always convenient.

Is there anything out there which would allow me to connect the camera (or an SD card) directly to the drive - and which would presumably have some sort of UI to drive it ? Alternatively - and better for me - would be some way of using my Android smartphone to drive the file transfer and see the drive's contents.

Any ideas ?
 
Cheapest and easiest solution is to buy more cards.

Next option is to buy the cheapest netbook that you can be happy with - either new or secondhand.

Bear in mind that offloading all your photos on to a single hard drive puts you at risk of losing everything should the drive fail or be lost. A netbook will give you its internal hard drive [assuming you buy one with enough space] plus the external HD as a backup.
 
If you've got an android phone you *might* be able to do it with a USB "on-the-go" (aka OTG on ebay) cable and a powered USB hub. Bit of a gamble though.

I managed to get my Galaxy S2 to talk to a card reader directly and bought a 32GB micro SD card for it, just take smaller SD out of camera and plug into card reader attached to phone...you may get an android to use a hub properly and talk to other attached devices.

A phone's USB port probably won't have enough juice to power up a USB hard drive.

Going the phone/sd card direct route means you could also back up the images to another card.
 
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MisterE said:
Cheapest and easiest solution is to buy more cards.

Next option is to buy the cheapest netbook that you can be happy with - either new or secondhand.

Bear in mind that offloading all your photos on to a single hard drive puts you at risk of losing everything should the drive fail or be lost. A netbook will give you its internal hard drive [assuming you buy one with enough space] plus the external HD as a backup.
Click to expand...

I agree with the above. Might be worth investing in a cheap Netbook to take with you.
 
When we're on our travels I use a tablet and a 500GB laptop hard drive in an external USB enclosure to backup my images. The SD card goes into the tablet and the images are transferred to both the tablet's storage and the external hard drive. The tablet and hard drive are then stored in two different places. With the SD card in the camera, the hard drive and the tablet I have the images in three different places....

Not that I'm paranoid!
 
Didn't Epson, Nikon and canon used to do portable drives that had a card reader and LCD built-in? Might be worth a gander... :)
 
gramps said:
Regularly see Epson 2000/5000/7000 coming up on eBay.
Click to expand...

I've got an Epson P4000, nice big screen and 80GB hard drive, plug SD/CF cards straight in and back up. Painfully slow transfer but it does the job and doesn't take up much space in the bag.
 
Archos (5 series and probably newer) do a hd with view screen plus and adapter to feed in the usb... Acts as a computer. Thing with Archos is although years past I would say go get one!, not now... their customer service is poor :/ Still the 5 series I have is still working, and 250gb plus the 30ukp adapter means I only need ten mins or so to offload the cameras 4gb...

Laptop with usb connections...

Possibly a tablet (although I haven't seen one that would recognise the comp and it would sink the already small tablet batteries...)

There were some other portable hd options at the back of camera magazines..

Can't seem to find an alternative on the google search...
 
Personally I would just take extra cards like in the old days when you finished a film and stuck it in your suitcase to be developed at home.
Or, you could try one of THESE...

Allan
 
specialman said:
Didn't Epson, Nikon and canon used to do portable drives that had a card reader and LCD built-in? Might be worth a gander... :)
Click to expand...

Not sure about Nikon, but Epson and Canon both had slow, expensive devices that would copy from card to disk.

A hyperdrive Colorspace does the same thing much, much faster.
 
I usually carry a netbook and external drive in my camera bag so I can download onto the netbook and make a copy on the external drive as well. However, that does take up quite a lot of time and if I'm busy shooting it can get to be a problem so I'm looking into getting one of these http://www.hypershop.com/HyperDrive-COLORSPACE-UDMA-s/64.htm once I can afford one. You can use any 2.5" SATA drive in it, but the 250Gb version will take a hell of a lot of photos to fill it.
 
hollis_f said:
Not sure about Nikon, but Epson and Canon both had slow, expensive devices that would copy from card to disk.

A hyperdrive Colorspace does the same thing much, much faster.
Click to expand...

A mate had a canon one but he was flush and bought it for the hell of it - he never actually gave me the verdict on whether it was any good :lol:

The Archos ones seemed to have a following.

Nikon did one called a Coolwalker (very Star Wars) but again, having never seen or used one can't tell whether it was lightning of slower than a slug climbing uphill :lol:
 
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