Yesterday I posted an article about an infield backup solution. The original post can be found here: https://theLightMatters.com/?p=355
The device arrived earlier today. Here are my initial thoughts…
Installation
This was extremely simple
- Open the lid
- Plug in the drive (didn’t worry about the jumpers)
- Fix drive mounting screws
- Fix lid
Partition/Format
This was slightly trickier. I originally created a single partition for the entire disk and formatted it as NTFS. This was a big mistake. To use the USB OTG feature to copy data from a media card, the drive must be formatted as FAT32 or at least have a FAT32 partition. It simply won’t work with NTFS. You can use NTFS with the unit but only as a USB mass storage device.
So, FAT32 is the way to go.
Next issue – WinXP won’t create a FAT32 partition above 32GB. This was no use to me as I had a 160GB drive. FAT32 will support >32GB partitions so you need to find an alternative method of creating it and formatting the drive. Luckily enough Mrs. theLightMatters has a laptop running OpenSUSE Linux and using this I created a single FAT32 partition that covered the entire 160GB.
Operation
Operation is simple. To use it to copy data from a flash card…
- Plug in the supplied external battery pack with 4 AA batteries
- Plug a card reader and card into the USB port
- Move the Power switch from “Off” to “Copy”
- Hit the “Copy” button
- Wait for the copy to complete
- Power down the unit
Performance
I haven’t carried out any kind of performance measurement and to be honest, life’s too short to worry about it for what I want to use it for. What I wil say though is to copy all the data from a full 2GB Sandisk Extreme III CF card took a similar time, if not slightly slower, than using the card reader with the laptop. For me, MB/s isn’t the critical factor it is battery life. With fresh batteries, how long will it last in the field?
Summary
So far I’m very impressed. The unit is very small, just slightly bigger than the hard disk it houses and similar in size to a multi-card reader. It comes supplied with a carry case, leads and an external battery pack. The biggest criticism I have is the lead on the battery pack looks like it will fracture in time – something to be wary of.
How well will it perform in the field? I’ll let you know tomorrow – I have a big shoot coming up in London and I’m planning to trial it then.
What impresses me the most is that for a little over £100 I have a fully redundant in-field, battery powered backup system (yes – I did buy two units) with a total capacity of 320GB.
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PROBLEM – Used this in anger this afternoon during a fashion shoot. I now know why the manual recommends using NiMH batteries. Whilst copying the images off the card, the batteries got depleted and corrupted the disk.
Not good for a backup solution 🙁
Will I trust it? Probably but I’ll be making sure that I only use fully charged batteries in future.
Been doing some testing this evening and it definitely looks like the issue I was seeing the other day was down to the batteries. The manual recommends NiMH and I was using standard alkaline batteries instead. Even though they were fresh out of the packet I don’t thing they were up to the job.
[…] on Feb.28, 2010, under Equipment, Lightroom, Workflow Following on fom my previous posts here and here about in-field backup and in particular the solution I have opted for, today I had the opportunity […]