A Portable Hard Drive Recommendation
by Mark Hatasaka
March 13, 2006
Ever since both my portable hard drive units failed in the Brazilian jungle in eary 2005, I've been on a quest to find a better unit. After buying and trying several, I've finally found one I can live with—the Digital Partner—$69.99 (without drive) from insidecomputer.com.
This is not the fastest portable drive out there nor is it the most sophisticated. It won't show your jpegs nor play your mpegs. Essentially, all it does is a journeyman's job of saving the contents of your memory cards in the field so you can keep on shooting. This solid if undistinguished performer serves up portable storage like the chuckwagon fare in City Slickers, "It's brown. It's hot. And there's plenty of it."
A backlit LCD is the one luxury feature, and it's a good one. It took operating the Digital Partner side by side with a non-backlit unit to fully appreciate the usefulness of backlighting in a surprisingly large number of diverse professional shooting situations.
- Memory Card Upload Speed—decent. Not the fastest out there, but well within the bounds of tolerability.
- Computer Upload Speed—decent. About average for a USB 2.0 external hard drive.
- Battery Life—good. Good enough to clear 12-16GB of Sandisk Extreme III CompactFlash with a single charge.
- Battery Charge Speed—good. About average for a LiIon battery.
- Battery Charge Retention—good. About average for LiIon.
- Size and Weight—above average. Noticeably light and compact.
- Build Quality—above average. Nice metal (aluminum) top and bottom plates. Excellent fit and finish. Solid, tight look and feel.
- Firmware—oohgah, oohgah. As in 2001-era primitive. Reliable download confirmation, pleeeease! Progress indicater, though, is good.
- Hard Drive Installation—excellent. Couldn't be simpler. Using the provided screwdriver, it's four screws out, pop off the bottom lid, slide in the hard drive, replace the bottom lid, four screws in. Be careful, though, it's super easy to loose those teeny, tiny screws.
- Connectivity—excellent. Just a driverless, USB 2.0 connection to my Windows 2000 and XP systems.
- Price—phenomenal to good. If you buy the unit w/o hard drive, the price is phenomenal, especially considering the backlit LCD feature. If you buy the unit with hard drive installed, you'll pay about a $20 premium over shopping around and buying the 2.5" drive separately. If you're not handy with computers, consider the premium a worthwhile installation fee.
Bottom Line
The bottom line on the Digital Partner portable hard drive unit is it has the journeyman performance and reliability to get you through just about any conceivable professional-level shoot (weddings, commercial studio gigs, backpacking trips, extended road trips, jungle expeditions, what have you).
One of the best features is the low price which encourages you to think multiple units. For example, it's better to have two 30GB portable drives rather than a single 60GB unit. Two drives adds a redundancy element, allows you to clear two cards simultaneously, and doubles the length of time you can operate away from mains electricity.
My personal, near-term roadmap calls for three Digital Partners—two to retrofit existing 20GB and 30GB drives, and one to house a new 60GB drive.