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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.
An iPod would be a battery-powered USB device (and Firewire) so what has this that the iPod hasn't ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
There are times when I want to go on holidays and just leave the laptop home (or in the hotel room) and just take lots of photos. This HDD would enable me to just copy the photos to a HDD whenever I max out my memory stick. I think this is a great idea, espcially for people who don't use computers when they are on holiday - which is the majority of the digital camera users I know.
You're out with a digital camera and without your laptop. And you've filled the camera memory, or exhausted all the removable storage (flash) you're carrying. Connect the camera (or the media adapter) to the disk drive and hit the "copy" button and you're ready to take more pictures.
Why would I bother? With the price of flash media for cameras so low, why would I want to carry around a hard drive that can break? I say buy a bunch of 1gig compact flash cards and put them in your pocket. Alot smaller then 2.5 inches. -shane
Because for my two month trip to Kerbleckistan, I'd rather a) not bring my laptop and b) not buy 40 1gig memory sticks at USD $300 or whatever the heck they cost for the journey despite wanting to take 40gig of photos.
How long will a HD last on AA batteries? with the chip to be powered also this could put quite a drian on those litttle duracels and energizers. I would hate to see the batteries fail while the drive was writing data, or updating the FAT.
but I'm still struggling a bit with the 'Why' part of the equation.
Just because you can't see a need for it, doesn't automatically make it pointless.
It'll copy the data off of a camera at the press of a button, and takes standard AA batteries which means you can carry a bag full of spares and not have to worry about running out of power in the middle of an important photo shoot.
You ask why? I here is my $0.02 worth. Because I don't want to have to cary my laptop with me when I go on vacation. I take my laptop because I can then take all the pictures I want and then offload the pictures at the end of the day to my laptop. If you don't have a way to offload the pictures you take then you either have to have tons of memmory cards for your Digicam or are limited to the number of pictures you can take.
I take my laptop with me on every vacation I take because I have to - not because I want to.
Not all of us primarily play games, some of us do practical work on these things. Photos are an excellent example but on the fly graphics back ups and editing small video pieces on location are two that come to mind fast. I just paid $80 on sale for a 1 gig jump drive. If for around $200 I could set up a portable back up that was 80X the size I'm interested. Images in any form take up a lot of space. Some of us are on the go and don't want to hunt for the nearest outlet to download a back up. Also dry cells are good for a big reason, you can get them anywhere. Waiting for a recharge isn't always an option. I bought an early laptop specifically because it was designed to work not only with battery packs but with off the shelf "C" cells. Came in handy. I'm a massive fan of extenal cases, I recieved my latest one from Ebay on Friday, and I found the story interesting. The whole point is to inform. Useful equipment isn't off topic to me.
A few years ago, I was a salesman at a small computer shop. We had a guy come in who wanted to buy a digital camera and a hard drive for offloading the photos to. However, they both had to be powered off standard alkaline batteries. Why?
Because he was going gold-mining in Siberia for three months during the summer. That means zero ability to recharge the camera, and he'd fill up a CF card pretty quick. Can't take a laptop... no way to recharge it. So, he needed a HD he could just take a box full of batteries to run it from.
We were able to help with the Camera (Canon rocks), but didn't have any options for a battery powered HD to put the photos on. This would have been perfect for his needs.
Thus, when it's connected to a camera, it would not only have to power its internal hard drive but also perhaps provide 500 mA to its own port for the camera (although it might not conform to that particular part of the USB specification). The whole idea of this gadget is that it replaces a laptop as a "data vault" for a digital camera - you don't have to have a host PC to grab files off your camera and clear your flash card for more pictures.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.