Arnoud Quanjer Wildlife Photography

When you buy a digital camera then  one of the first things you need to consider is the storage for your pictures. All digital cameras store pictures on memory cards ranging in size from 512MB to 8GB and larger. If you shoot in RAW mode, which I think you should, the image that is stored on the memory card will use anywhere between 6-16MB depending on the number of mega pixels that your camera records. I use two 8.2MP cameras, a Canon 20D and 30D, and pictures taken by these cameras use around 7-8MB of space. This means that if you use a 2GB memory card then you'll be able to store anywhere between 150 and 300 pictures on this card depending on your camera. If you're going on a two or three week trip you'll probably shoot in the range of 1000 - 3000 pictures, or maybe even more than that. You can do a number of things: you can buy lots of memory cards, you can bring a laptop for storing the pictures or you can buy a separate device that will give you the option of storing the pictures for you.

Memory cards are extremely reliable but also relatively expensive. I shoot a lot of pictures when I'm in Africa, 15GB of pictures per week is more a rule than an exception for me. If I'd have to buy memory cards for all my pictures then I'd have to spen a small fortune on memory cards, so for me the option of buying memory cards for storage was not a very cost effective one. Carrying a laptop would be ideal, but I have to fly to Africa as I live in Europe and with the current handluggage regulations I'm having a hard time getting my photo gear on the plane let alone a laptop. The third option is buying a dedicated device that can copy the memory cards to an internal hard drive. In four years of digital photography I've used a number of portable hard disks: A Image Tank G2, Vosonic models 3310 and 3320 and NextToDi models ND-2525, ND2700 and OTG XPress. Below is a quick review of each of these devices.

Hard drive selection

All the devices mentioned above use 2,5" laptop drives. Although laptop drives are designed to stand up to a certain amount of abuse, you are going to need to keep the device as still as possible while it is actually operating. Otherwise the copy could fail or the hard-drive may fail altogether. I recommend that whatever device you buy that you buy a shell (no hard drive installed) and then purchase a laptop hard drive from solid manufacturer (e.g., Western Digital or Seagate). I used to use 60GB Western Digital Scorpio drives but have switched to 80GB Seagate Momentus 5400.3 drives as they are ultra shock resistant and have a very good track record in reliability. Shock resistance is an issue for your hard drives if you're planning to explore the less traveled paths in Africa as the roads in those parts of Africa are not smooth tarmac roads. 

I have never had problems with any of my hard drives. I always carry two 80GB hard drives, one of the hard drives is installed in the portable hard disk shell and I switch that one for the other 80GB hard drive halfway down the trip. This way I only lose half my pictures should a hard drive crash. After I get home from a trip to Africa I copy the contents of the hard drives to my PC and do the sorting out of the pictures on my PC. I then move all the pictures to one of the 80GB hard drives and then that hard drive goes into my archive as a backup. When I tell people that I store the hard drives in my archive most people laugh and react surprised. For some reason people think that archiving the hard drives is an expensive hobby. An 80GB hard disk costs around $70 and holds around 10000 pictures...that's less than 1 cent per picture so I don't think it's that expensive at all. A hard drive is also a much more reliable medium to store pictures on than a DVD is. The only thing more reliable than a hard drive is a DAT tape. Maybe I'll switch to tapes for backup purposes in the future but for now storing the hard drives and making a second backup on DVD will do.

LCD screens, do you need them...

There are many of these devices available on the market. Some of them offer an LCD so you can review your pictures and others just offer the option of copying files from a memory card to an internal hard disk. I don't need to review my pictures in the field, I don that at home so I don't need a fancy (and expensive) device with an LCD screen. If you like to review your pictures in the field and maybe want to have the option of deleting unsharp pictures during your trip then you'll need to get a device with an LCD screen. Keep in mind that these devices have a much shorter battery life than the devices without an LCD screen. Make sure that you get a car charger for your device if you are getting one with an LCD screen. If you don't want to review your pictures during a trip then buy a device that is fast, has good battery life and is easy to operate in the field.

Image Tank G2

The Image Tank G2 was the first portable hard disk that I bought. When I bought it there weren't many different brands of portable hard disks available and the Imagetank G2 seemed to be a good product with a fair price. The Image Tank worked perfectly, but copying CF cards to the internal hard drive was painfully slow and the battery life wasn't very good. I could copy around 10GB data and then the battery would be empty. I did have a car charger for the G2 but recharging it took a long time. A lot of G2 owners are complaining on the Internet that the battery of their device is no longer working after two to three years of service so I guess my G2's battery life was pretty typical. I bought the G2 without a hard drive and installed a 2.5-inch hard drive myself. Installing a hard drive is very easy to do in the G2. For transferring the pictures to the PC the Image Tank G2 offers a USB 2.0 connection. If your computer supports USB 2.0 the data will be transferred at up to 0.48MB/second. The Image Tank G2 is equipped with a CompactFlash Type II card slot and using that slot the Image Tank G2 can use CF flash cards (type I and II) or Microdrives. To handle other media you'll need to use a CF adapter which is not included with the Image Tank G2.

My conclusion for this device is that it works as advertised but copying cards is slow and the battery life leaves much to be desired.

Vosonic VP3310

After one trip with the Image Tank G2 I decided that I needed to get a device that copied faster and boasted better battery life. After reading some reviews I decided  to buy a VoSonic VP-3310 X's-Drive. Just like the Image Tank G2 this device can use a 2.5-inch hard drive which you can easily install yourself. The 3310 can read most of the popular memory card types that are available on the market today (including CF and SD). Besides being a portable hard drive which you can use to store your pictures the 3310 is also an MP3 player. The Vosonic VP3310 is simple to use - just insert your memory card and press the large Copy button to copy its contents onto the device. Copying files from a CF card to the VP3310 is faster than what the Image Tank G2 manages but it still takes 7-8 minutes to copy a full 1GB CF card to the internal hard drive. It's also possible to copy file by file from the memory card to the HDD with its single file copy feature. The similar single file deletion feature allows to delete each file stored on the X'S-Drive Pro Hard disk or the memory card inserted. You can access the files stored on the Hard Drive via your computer with the new USB 2.0 Connection, you can also use the X'S-Drive Pro as a USB Combo card reader. The Vosonic VP3310 has a blue backlit monochrome LCD display that enables you to see a list of the files that are stored on it - there is no actual viewing of the images themselves.  The X'S-Drive Pro includes a built-in internal Lithium Ion rechargeable battery which will give you a battery life of around two hours. You can change the internal battery so should it fail for whatever reason then you don't need to buy a new device but just a new battery.

My conclusion for this device is that it worked like a charm. I thought that copying from CF was still slow but I could live with that. Battery life was very good so overall I was very pleased with it. Sadly my VP3310 was stolen in 2003 and I had to buy a new one. The VP3310 had then just been replaced by the VP3320 so I bought a VP3320.

Vosonic VP3320

When I got the VP3320 I more or less expected it to work like the VP3310. The Vosonic VP3320 is similar to the X's-drive Pro VP3310 but this new version features faster transfer rate up to 4MB/s and has longer battery life of up to 7 Hours with the standard battery. New features on the VP3320 are an FM radio and a voice recording function. I never use the radio or voice recorder so those features don't mean much to me.

A new feature that is useful for photographers on the VP3320 however is the fact that you can see the status of the last copy operation when you power on the device. It has happened so often to me using the VP3310 model that I wasn't paying attention while copying a CF card and because of that didn't see if the copy operation had succeeded. The VP3310 and VP3320 will power off after a couple of seconds of inactivity and using the VP3310 there was no way to see if the last operation had succeeded. On the VP3320 a happy or sad smiley is shown when you power on the device. If the smiley is happy then the operation succeeded and if you see a sad smiley then the operation failed. I cannot tell you how useful it is to have that information in the field. My conclusion for this device is that it is a near perfect device. It can copy a full 1GB CF card in five to six minutes and has very good battery life. I highly recommend this device.

Unfortunately my trusted VP3320 died in Jnauary 2008. It still started up, but it refused to spin the hard drive, probably due to a buggered hard drive controller. I bought a Vosonic 2600 (OTG XPress) as a replacement.

NextoDI models

In 2007 I read about a Korean manufacturer (NextoDI) of personal storage devices (PSD) on dpreview.com. The devices made by this manufacturer allegedly copied data way faster then any other PSD on the market. I'm a sucker for electronic gadgets so when I read this article I ordered the fastest model that the offered at the time (ND2525). This model delivered the sizzling copying speed that was offered (1GB within one minute) so I decided to replace all my PSD's by NextoDI models. I found out that not all the models use the same voltage adapters. The ND2525 uses a 12V DC adapter and the OTG XPress and ND2700 use a 5V DC power adapter. All the NextoDI devices have over-voltage protection so mixing up the chargers is not a problem, but it is a nuisance to have to label the chargers to make sure you don't mix them up.

All models that I've used come highly recommended. I haven't had any issues with these models.

NextoDI ND2525

The ND2525 copies a full 1GB CF card in 40 seconds (yes 40 seconds!) and can copy 40GB of data without recharging the battery. It will copy at of a sustained rate of 20MB/sec from Compact Flash cards and can hit a maximum speed of 32MB/sec. That's more than 1GB of data per minute! I've used the ND2525 on a couple of trips to Africa now and I still cannot believe how fast it is. 

You can use a bit-by-bit verification implemented at the hardware level; that feature, however, will double your transfer times -- a sacrifice many professionals will happily trade for added peace of mind. The device then hooks up to your PC or Mac via USB 2.0 or Firewire. The internal Li-Poly battery is capable of transferring up to 40GB (about 42 minutes) before giving up the ghost, and can be recharged in about 3-hours off the mains or 4.5-hours over USB. Because it copies from CF so fast I now always use the verification feature.

Just like the VoSonic VP3320 the ND2525 will show the status of the last copy process when you switch on the unit. A handy feature of the ND2525 is that is beeps when it has finished a copy operation so you know when it has finished without having to look at the display. Operating the ND2525 is very easy. The device only has one button which is used for turning the device on and off and for navigating through the menu. When I first used the device I thought the one button concept was a bit awkward, but now that I'm used to it I actually like the simplicity of it. Another nice feature of the ND2525 is that if you copy a CF card, turn off the device and insert the same CF card that the device will see that you've inserted the same CF card. It will then ask you if you'd like to verify the last copy operation. It gives you two options for verification. The first option is only verifying the first 128 bytes of the files and the second option is full verification. Using full verification you can double check if the files have been copied correctly.

My conclusion for this device is that it does everything that it should do and does it so well that I wonder if it can be improved. Battery life is awesome, copying a CF is so fast that I no longer have the need for more than one spare CF card and operating the ND2525 is so easy a child could do it. On top of that it is a very light and small device and that is always a bonus with the current hand luggage regulations.

NexttoDI OTG XPress

I purchased a model OTG XPress as a backup to my model ND2525. The main reason for buying a OTG XPress is the option of copying data from any USB devices such as PSP, PMP, digital camcorder or digital camera without aid of PC. You can copy data from any USB device to the OTG XPress by connecting the USB device to the OTG XPress with a USB cable. The OTG XPress can sync the two devices. This which means that it can copy all data from the USB device to the OTG XPress. During the copy operation all the data on the USB device which is not on the OTG XPress will be copied. This means that if you've copied the USB device to the OTG XPress and then add a folder to the USB device the OTG XPress will only copy the new folder when you SYNC the two devices.

I use this feature on my trips to Africa to make a backup of my primairy PSD (an ND2700) every night. By sync'ing the devices every night I can only lose one day of images in case the hard drive in my ND2700 crashes. This system uses a lot of hard drives as images are stored twice on separate hard drives, but it's a system that minimizes the risc of losing images due to hard drive failure. 

NextoDI ND2700 Extreme

I've recently purchased a NextoDI model ND2700 as a replacement for my ND2525. The reason for replacing the ND2525 was the fact that the power adapters of the ND2525 and OTG XPress are not interchangeable. This seems like only a minor inconvenience, but to me it's a major inconvenience. I take over 20kg of gear with me on my trips and this includes chargers for external hard drives, camera's, batteries, GPS, etc. If I can use one power adapter and car adapter on two NextoDI devices then that cuts down on the gear I have to take with me, and that's important to me.

In operation the ND2700 is basically the same as the ND2500. The menu's are the same, the one touch backup is the same, average battery life is the same and the copying speed is also more or less the same. What is different to the ND2500 is:

• eSATA hard drive support instead of PATA hard drive;
• USB 2.0 and eSATA support (no FireWire support like in  the ND2525)
• More supported media types: CF type 1 and 2/SD/SDHC/MMC/MMC/MS and xD
• Big volume hard drive support 
• OTG backup technology

 I'll add a review of this device after I've had the opportunity to give it a workout.