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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.
so what has this that the iPod hasn't ?
The ability to connect it directly to a camera, and copy all the data across at the press of a button.
Something that's very useful to people taking lots of pictures and storing them in Raw format.
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.
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.
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.