Mobile mass storage devices

I have just invested in a Jobo Giga One 40Gb storage device for when I'm out 'n about wi' me camera.

It's absolutely brilliant and simplicity itself to use. When attached to the PC it appears as four additional drives, 3 card drives and the 40Gb hard drive.

To copy data from a card to this device involves only:- 1: turn the thing on and 2: press the copy button. Its reasonably fast too. I haven't done a time trial yet but I will and let you know the result. It's internal battery (a downer, like the iPod) is rechargeable and is said to last long enough to download 10Gb of data but I think that's a bit conservative and it'll do more than that.

At only £1.50/1Gb this to me seems a much cheaper option than buying oodles of cards for an extended trip and 40Gig is certainly enough for a days shooting, mine anyway. It would have been nice for it to be equipped with a car charger too but I use a 12v - 230V inverter anyway so no problem recharging it on the move.

This is not a viewing device, simply a storage device, which is all I wanted as when I view my images, I want to see them on a 17/19" monitor, not a 2.5" thing.

Now for the good bit, for anyone interested. I bought mine from Warehouse Express's bargain basement under the 'repaired' section. They retail at £99 but they have plenty of 'repairs' at £60. Mine was accompanied by a job sheet detailing the 'repair'. The original purchaser had reformatted it using the HTFS file system and it stopped working (Queue Cilla - surprise surprise).

The repair was simply to reformat it. It uses the FAT32 file system and whilst it can be used as a removeable PC storage/backup device, the FAT32 FS limits file sizes to 4Gig (if memory serves me right) so its no good for lengthy video's.

Caveat emptor: Eventually, hard drives fail, sometimes catastrophically especially if dropped. If its got valuable images or data on it when it happens to you . . . you don't know me, you did not read this, right?

I'll do my time trial later. Andy Rouse has given this device a reasonable write up too.

I have no commercial interest or other association with Warehouse Express, only as a customer and a desire to pass on gems of info like this.

Cheers,

Sounds good to me - easier and cheaper than toting a laptop, more diskspace than a direct to CD / DVD device. The only problem is, that I can bet that within 6 months you'll get 80-100 gig for the same price!

That's always the difficult decision, to buy or to wait for the next model that's half the size, twice the capacity, twice as fast etc., etc.

There is an 80Gb Giga One model out already at £159 (2 X 40Gb 'repaired' model = £120). Problem is, you can end up waiting forever. I based my decision on a probable need to buy more SD cards when I get my K10D (see, I can wait). With this device I don't need any more cards of any type for a very long time, assuming they don't fail of course.

Cheers,

The result of my speed test.

Using a Lexar Media 80X Professional CF card I transferred 999Mb of RAW photo files from the card to the Giga One in 8 minutes 45 secs and now . . . I haven't a clue if that is good or bad performance. It works out to around 114Mb/min transfer speed.

I'm now doing a battery longevity test . . . more later.

I acquired a the Vosonic equivalent to the Jobo - again as a reduced cost repair item from Warehouse Express and basically pleased with it

I discovered that having copied data over to PC and then deleting from the Vosonic, that whilst explorer shows no files remaing on it, that the capacity has not leapt back up to 40Gb. I have to go onto 'properties' for the Vosonic and then run 'disk-clean' up to empty the 'recycle bin' to get back to full capacity. is this normal :

Andy

My initial battery longevity test results for the Jobo Giga One: After its initial charge the battery died at the 11th time of copying 999Mb of images to the device. SO it's reasonably safe to say that the battery is good for about 10Gb of copying before it dies. Should be enough for a day's shoot I reckon. That's around 800-900 RAW images.

alfpics: No such issue with the Jobo device. I have no experience of your model.

I have been looking at getting just the enclosure as in QCool. I think if you purchase both separately it is cheaper.

alfpics,

on further testing of this Jobo Giga One jobbie, it does appear to have some flaw in its calculation of available space. I did a test whereby I copied around 10Gigs of images from a CF card to it, then moved (not copied) them to the PC using Windows Explorer. Checking the Jobo's hard drive's available space in Windows reveals 39Gb, which is to be expected as it was now empty. The display on the Jobo however shows 29Gb being available, not the 39Gb that it started with.

Having visited the Jobo website it seems that the diplayed available free space is reset only be reformatting the device . . . which I think is a bit daft personally. Maybe this will be fixed at some point with a firmware update.

Its still a pretty neat device for all that and I'd still recommend it to anybody that wants a simple storage medium without viewing capabilities.