> > "John Francis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > >> This nifty gizmo just showed up on DP Review yesterday: > >> http://www.dpreview.com/news/0401/04010501epsonp1000.asp > > > >Sweet. Put a 40GB drive in it, and .PEF support, and I'd > >be seriously tempted. > > I'll bet both are coming. > > > But 10GB is definitely on the small size. > > I think it's enough for a day's shooting for most people; a dump onto a > laptop PC would follow.
I want something large enough so that I've got multiple copies of the image until I've burned it off onto CD or DVD - I really, *really* try to avoid a single point of failure at any time. (For example, I don't re-use a compact flash card or microdrive until I've copied the image files to both the portable drive and to my laptop). Even after dumping to the laptop I'll keep images on the portable hard drive for a while until I've had time to sit down and make the backups onto more permanent media. That's a great deal easier now I have a notebook with a CD burner. I actually bought an Archos 20GB USB hard drive some years ago for just that purpose, even though in those days I only had a 3MP digital camera. I no longer use it because it doesn't work well with XP, and because the battery charging circuit has died. But the nice thing about a 20GB drive was that I'd enough space for images, and could still use 5-10 GB for MP3 audio files so I had something to listen to on the road. When I get a replacement (with a viewing screen, and a direct CF reader - both functions the Archos didn't offer) I'll look for a unit with enough space to have room for audio, too.
