Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2009/01/08

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Subject: [Leica] Travel hard drive?
From: henningw at archiphoto.com (Henning Wulff)
Date: Thu Jan 8 23:39:57 2009
References: <200901080339.n083bIoK006523@server1.waverley.reid.org> <9E6C018A-F131-4282-B56D-1EF47573B4C0@gmail.com>

>Hey All,
>
>I'm doing some more traveling soon and don't want to lug my laptop 
>around everywhere.
>
>Can someone recommend a very small inexpensive device to download 
>several hundred pictures from an SD card on to?
>
>TIA,
>
>Cheers,
>
>Craig


This comes up every 6 months, and the answer changes slightly as 
technology advances and the prices vary.

Your options are:

1. Extra cards. This is probably the cheapest option, especially if 
you don't want backups or don't take too many pictures. With an M8, 
you need 10.1Mb per shot, so a 16Gb card holds nearly 1500 shots.

2. Something like the Vosonics, Hyperdrives, etc. The best of these 
are the Nexto drives, as they always test the fastest and have the 
largest amount of data transfer between charges. You can buy them 
without HD's, so that you can put in whatever size you want. There's 
now a US distributor, but the prices here are higher now. I bought a 
couple 3 years ago and still use them regularly. On trips my wife 
puts one in her suitcase and I put one in my camera bag.

3. A netbook and small 2.5in. HD's. This is the most versatile, as it 
gives you web access, e-mail, writing and the ability to view and 
sort pictures as well as store them to multiple inexpensive drives. 
This is what I now take with me. You don't need much; a low-end Acer 
Aspire and some WD 250Gb drives are less than two of the units in 2. 
above, and are certainly not very much bigger either.


So the decision for me now is 1. or 3. If I'm gone for a couple of 
days, I take enough cards, and if more I take the netbook. However, 
you can also take 1. and 2. and have a backup, ie., don't erase your 
cards but store them after downloading them to the self contained 
backup drive.


-- 

    *            Henning J. Wulff
   /|\      Wulff Photography & Design
  /###\   mailto:henningw@archiphoto.com
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