If you travel with a laptop, and back up your flash cards to your hard disk, you may be wonderingĦ"What happens if my laptop crashes?"
I faced that quandary recently as I started experiencing problems with the logic board on my Apple PowerMac G4 17" laptop. I had 17 gigs of data on the laptop that I needed to backup before giving the computer to Apple for repair.
To do this job, I wanted a firewire drive that was light, portable, reliable and reasonably priced. I found one in Smart Disk's FireLite Portable 40 Gig hard drive.
The unit is about the size of a Palm PDA. It is supplied in a magnesium alloy housing which makes it both light and strong.
My favorite thing about this drive is that it does not need a power cord. It draws its power through the supplied firewire cable. Carrying one of those heavy power bricks around with the drive would have made it anything but portable.
While I have no way to formally rate the transfer speeds, the drive seemed quick and responsive and my Apple Macintosh computer instantly recognized it when I plugged it into the firewire port. I was able to restore the backed up laptop data easily by just plugging the drive into my desktop G5's front firewire port and dragging the files to an internal hard disk. It worked like a charm.
While I didn't test it, SmartDisk says that these portable hard disks work just as well on Windows machines.
How else can you use one of these drives? You can use it to transfer documents and data easily between office and home. You can use it to boost laptop or desktop storage capacity. You can use it as a high-capacity "sneakernet" or to back-up critical files and software programs.
At about $150, the 40 Gig FireLite is a must have accessory for every photographer who travels and shoots digitally.
About the author
Scott Bourne is the author of "88 Secrets to Selling & Publishing Your Photography", "88 Secrets to Photoshop for Photographers" & "88 Secrets to Wildlife Photography" available at Olympic Mountain School Press, http://www.mountainschoolpress.com
