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Battery-Powered USB Enclosure
An anonymous reader pointed us to a story about a battery-powered USB disk enclosure. It operates on AA batteries. It's aluminum, and is sorta meant to offload data from cameras. It's only 2.5 inches, so that's not totally unreasonable, but I'm still struggling a bit with the 'Why' part of the equation.
It's only 2.5 inches, so that's not totally unreasonable, but I'm still struggling a bit with the 'Why' part of the equation.
...and your camera is quickly free, ready to shoot some more. It sits in between the capability of a laptop for storage, and a mere HD for size convenience. When you're running around with a Camera and camera bag and need to get hundreds of photos done, carrying around even a 12" laptop is extremely cumbersome. slip this device inside your camera bag and you're running at an advantage.
This drive isn't JUST a drive like other 2.5" USB external drives. It also has the ability to talk to other USB devices, such as a camera (or sound recorder, or what have you). It can mount the USB device - let's use a camera for argument's sake - and copy files from it at the press of a button. Normal USB drives do NOT do this. the iPod doesn't either, without extra hardware.
So the point is - you can run around with your brand new EOS 1Ds Mark II spitting out 10MB RAW 16megapixel images all day long, and not have to worry about a maximum of 4GB on your (expensive!) compact flash card. You can shoot a bunch of images, connect to the drive, press a button to transfer to an 80GB drive...
What does this mean?
Well, if you want to dump Photos from a USB camera, the HD must be attached to a whole PC and OS! A battery-powered device that manages to maintain a USB root hub, and have an HD attached is a pretty nifty trick, and offers many (not all) of the Firewire advantages. It is certainly compact and lightweight, and I doubt you wait for it to boot...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I'm really surprised that none of the manufacturers have tapped this. I want a little 5-port hub that takes a couple AA batteries, that I can throw in my laptop bag and use to do diagnostics (tap an ethernet line, etc). I've tried doing this myself, but most hubs I've found are either insanely high voltages (18.5 or something), or weird tollerances (3.2v, where it won't tollerate 3v or 4.5v), or huge wattage consumption.
I came close with a 5-port linksys "hub" that didn't consume much power and took 7.5v, so I chained 5 AA batteries together in a harness and mucked together a connector. It has a decent battery life (about 3 hours normal use), but the 5-port linksys "hubs" ARE ACTUALLY SWITCHES. Stupid linksys.
Anyways, if you happen to work at a networking manufacturer, lightly suggest to them to produce a small hub with a built-in battery bay that takes 4 AA batteries or something.
Okay, it's cool. However, it may not be the best pick if you want to offload pictures from your camera / camera's card.
:
There's lots more options here
http://fhoude34.free.fr/PortableHD_Main.htm
Most are going to be a good bit bigger, but have more functionality as well.
As a semi-pro photographer, I can see the benefit of connecting a headless hard drive to a camera, but I wouldn't like the idea of waiting for USB-speed transfers from my camera.
Instead, I use a similar device (the X's Drive Pro), which is an external hard drive (USB) that includes several built-in card readers. Connected to the PC, the card readers and hard drives are individually mounted, but when not connected to the computer, the device itself can copy everything on the connected memory cards to the hard drive with a single button click.
This workflow allows me to fill up a CF card, put another in the camera and keep shooting, and put the full CF card in the drive and let it make the backup copy while sitting in the camera bag.
I then *only* reuse cards if I run out, thus protecting against a hard drive drop/failure, errored-out copy, dead hard drive battery, etc.
When you are serious about photography, having an hard drive backup with automated copy capability is a MUST. I just got a call this morning from a friend whose photographer accidently lost some wedding ceremony pictures due to a failed copy to his laptop--he reused the card for Christmas before realizing it, so 15 shots couldn't be recovered (I was there as well in a non-pro capacity and got a few keepers). It's also a heckuva lot cheaper than having an endless supply of CF cards to travel with.
It's Taco. He has something of a history of not seeing the point - eg the iPod, which he described as "lame" when it was first released.
It's not entirely his fault though - most new technologies and techniques get slammed here. This is unusual in that none of the +5 rated comments (currently) are negative.
It's official. Most of you are morons.