meet my new best friend!!!!!!

[adam75south]

haven't quite came up with a name for him yet...but just picked this bad boy up from circuit city last night for $129....320GB Western Digital Passport!!!!!

now i can export my catalogs from lightroom, work on them wherever i want, then merge it back into the main computer at home when i'm done!!!!! i'm so pumped about this. no more burning DVD's and going back and forth and copying to the computer and back to DVD. and the best part is, this thing works on my mac and my pc, i love it.

as far as names are concerned the only one i've came up with is george "WD" bush after our babbling commander and chief. dunno why, just every time i see a W i think bush. so for short, he'll be called Dubya. you're welcome to throw out your own suggestions as well.

[adam75south]

maybe i'll just call him george.

[BBPhoto]

Thy are great little drives. Really slow but excellent for backups and other non-time critical applications. I love the fact that they are powered by the USB port. Amazing how prices keep falling too...

[Nickcanada]

That thing is tiny! how about "lil' george" or "lil' dubya"

That looks freaking awesome. Is it fast?

[24Peter]

The Passports are great. I picked up a 160GB version a year ago for $89. I use it more for video editing and backup than pic storage, but they're plenty fast for even HD video.

Adam - try SyncToy to sync files between your Windows computer and the drive: http://www.microsoft.com/DownLoads/details.aspx?familyid=C26EFA36-98E0-4EE9-A7C5-98D0592D8C52&displaylang=en

[adam75south]

i'll tell you how fast it is by the end of the day. haven't done much on it yet, but i will. it SHOULD be fast enough for small catalogs with lightroom, i'm not sure if i'd put my full catalog on here and i definitely wouldn't edit in photoshop with it. for a catalog with a little over 200 pics it's a 5MB catalog. the preview folder is about 100MB. so if you think about it, when you edit a single picture it has to write changes to the 5MB catalog file and a .5MB preview file. so let's just say 10MB to be safe. the drive theoretically can do 400Mbits/s so that's about 50MB/s..40MB to be safe. i might be wrong here though so someone feel free to correct me. i guess if you sync all 200 pics at once it will probably bog down for a bit....but theoretically shouldn't be a problem for working in lightroom.

problem is my laptop kinda goes slow in lightroom anyway. it's only a 1.66Ghz core duo(not core 2 duo) with 1GB ram. and if you notice i also have a few programs open at all times...AIM, firefox, and Outlook....so that 1GB ram probably bogs me down before george does. i guess i'd have to try it on the beast at home to really see the speed difference. i got a core 2 quad clocked to 3.2Ghz with 4GB 800Mhz RAM. of course i'll never use it there besides syncing the changes. it's sad, i hardly ever use the beast except for surfing the web and occasional photoshoppage. just don't feel like working when i'm at home.

[adam75south]

i like lil dubya and lil george. thanks nick!

[danidabi]

Congrats on your new arrival:D I like the name lil Dubya!

[moxy81]

I think you should call it "Picture Pig" and sing Home's spider pig song, but sub in picture for spider.
"Picture pig, Picture Pig, does whatever a picture pig does"

[Visual Reality]

I call mine "The Archive".

It's on a 1TB WD Greenpower drive in a Rosewill enclosure, using eSATA. Blows the doors off of USB and Firewire. It's too bad laptops don't have eSATA ports yet or I'd be able to use it for that too.

It doesn't run off of USB power, and does have its own plug, but when backing up the amount of data I do (4 computers) and then putting it away,. it's damn nice.

The Passport would be pretty cool for its size though, probably the best portable / laptop backup solution that I know of since you don't have to find a power outlet.

[michaelb]

....
Adam - try SyncToy to sync files between your Windows computer and the drive: http://www.microsoft.com/DownLoads/details.aspx?familyid=C26EFA36-98E0-4EE9-A7C5-98D0592D8C52&displaylang=en

I have one of these - I like it alot.

Is there a way to "sync" in only one direction though? - I have files on the external hard drive that I don't want on my PC (My poor old Dell is only 60 GB :()

[cdifoto]

Awesome. :D

Any idea what the spin speed is on that bad boy? I paid around that for an 80GB & my own enclosure a little bit ago...wanted to be sure I got a fast SATA drive for the same purposes.

[adam75south]

it's 5400 rpm.

yea i was complaining about the same thing VR. eSATA should be standard on any computer, laptop or desktop. i really don't know why it's not. i know you can get laptop cards with eSATA but have no idea if those slots can even keep up with eSATA speeds.

hopefully soon we'll see these little portable ones with eSATA and maybe an extra USB plug just for power.

and nick, after working on 765 pictures today, i can't see a difference in speed in lightroom on this laptop. but like i said, it's slow anyway. no difference on exporting either since the cpu can't make em faster than they can transfer. win/win situation me thinks.

[24Peter]

Is there a way to "sync" in only one direction though? - I have files on the external hard drive that I don't want on my PC (My poor old Dell is only 60 GB :()

Yes, there are three (I think) different options - sync, echo, mirror or something like that.

eSATA - only problem with them I think is these ports are not powered. Fine for desktop backup, but if you don't want to carry around a power adapter, then not really an option for laptops I don't think.

[cdifoto]

I bought an eSATA express card for my bigger external but it crapped out on me shortly after purchase. Went back to USB and haven't had problems. I usually make it a point to work off my internal drive and then move everything to the external after I'm done instead of trying to work off the external. The pocket size drive is just for backup so I can keep it physically on me....since I've insured my stuff I've taken a "I don't care what happens to the gear as long as I have my images" approach. It's far less stressfull than feeling like you have to watch everything like a hawk and never let it out of your sight.

[Visual Reality]

Awesome. :D

Any idea what the spin speed is on that bad boy? I paid around that for an 80GB & my own enclosure a little bit ago...wanted to be sure I got a fast SATA drive for the same purposes.
What drive are you talking about specifically? I ask because WD's smoking (not literally, as in speed) 640GB drive is $89.99...

[cdifoto]

What drive are you talking about specifically? I ask because WD's smoking (not literally, as in speed) 640GB drive is $89.99...
I lied. I paid $60 and it's SATA but only 5400RPM. I'm a crappy shopper when it comes to this stuff.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136099

I then went on eBay to get a $10 USB enclosure. Kinda defeats the purpose of SATA I guess. Oh well.

[michaelb]

Yes, there are three (I think) different options - sync, echo, mirror or something like that....


Sweet; thanks Peter.

[24Peter]

Sweet; thanks Peter.

If you read the info, SyncToy was developed specifically for digital photographers to manage/backup/sync large numbers of image files. However, I use it to sync files between my laptop and desktop computers, so it's mostly Word files, pdf's etc. To backup my photos, I usually just drag & drop from my desktop to one of my external HD's. Point is, SyncToy is pretty useful for different applications.

[adam75south]

eSATA - only problem with them I think is these ports are not powered. Fine for desktop backup, but if you don't want to carry around a power adapter, then not really an option for laptops I don't think.

that's why i'd like to see an eSATA drive that has a seperate USB plug just for power. as soon as laptops start coming standard with eSATA i'm sure we'll see them.

[adam75south]

nevermind, looks like they already make some...
http://oyendigital.com/esata-hard-drive.html

[adam75south]

i'm still extremely happy with my passport though.

[24Peter]

Wonder what the real world throughput is for eSATA drives. Based on my experience with USB 2.0, the whole "up to" thing (150MB/sec) is specious. I've had many USB 2.0 devices and none ever came close 60MB/sec. My WD Passport is one of the fastest but it's still only around 10-11MB/sec - 1/6th the advertised max of USB 2.0 devices...

[adam75south]

and a lot of USB drives have varied speeds anyway. i was reading reviews on some portable drives in a laptop magazine and the WD passport has some of the slowest tested write times of all portable hard drives. but it had good reviews still because of the silence and lack of heat.

i think i'll test mine and see what mine'll do. i'll let y'all know what i come up with.

[adam75south]

ok so i got my nerd quota in for the month on this one.

i did my own not-so-scientific test. copied 1,092 files in 7 folders, all raw cr2 files. they equalled 8,443,925,021 bytes or 8,052.75MB.

i used the stopwatch on my phone to time it.

writing them to my external hard drive took exactly 7min 40sec.....averaging 17.5MB/s.

then I deleted the files from my computer and copied them back to my computer from the passport. this took 10min 42sec....averaging 12.5MB/s.

so there you go...nowhere near 60MB/s.

although that wasn't bad timing at all for moving almost 8 gigs of data....i was disappointed to see the low MB/s number...you should be able to expect closer to the 60MB/s max since it's a number they use to sell you on it. makes me curious about network speeds as well and especially wireless N.