SmartDisk 80GB External Hard Drive Mini-Review
If you find yourself out on the road with your digital camera it is likely that you will at some point run out of memory card storage. So what do you do? Well, like most you might just keep your notebook computer close at hand to download your pictures to or you can simply swap out for a fresh memory card. Both of these solutions work well if you are not in a hurry and you don’t mind carrying your laptop with you but what if you don’t want to lug around a heavy laptop and a fistful of memory cards just makes you cringe? Well, thankfully someone has thought up a simple solution to this common problem: an external hard drive that can read common memory card formats! I can’t say enough good things about this concept. When you are out on the road being able to pull out a battery operated hard drive that you can just pop your memory card into to back up your photos is just plain awesome. Big question is; does the SmartDisk 80GB (PB80) stack up? Read on to find out.
When I saw the SmartDisk 80GB sitting on the shelf at my local Best Buy I just could not resist. I was planning a trip and the ability to download photos to a hard drive vs. lugging my trusty MacBook overseas was very compelling so I quickly decided to pick one of these units up. My initial impressions were very positive, case was solid display was spartan but functional. I could hear the drive spin up when turned on and overall the unit worked well downloading photos off my compact flash cards I normally use with my Canon 20D and Rebel XT.
Performance was quite good, photos were copied quickly and it proved quite a bit faster than my previous mobile solution. I while back I had purchased a small USB device that would allow me to download photos directly off my camera onto a older generation iPod. Back when all I had was a simple point and shoot camera this solution worked quite well but later experiences with the Rebel and other cameras was problematic so I had started just downloading things directly to the MacBook. I was hoping the SmartDisk 80GB would change all that.
Although the SmartDisk had great performance and was nice and simple to use I did manage to find a show stopping issue with the unit. I was a happy camper until I grabbed the SDHC memory card out of my girlfriend’s point and shoot Nikon. No matter what I did the SmatDisk just would not read the card. Thinking this to be an issue with just that one type of card I did a bit of research online only to discover that the SmartDisk 80GB simply cannot read ANY SDHC memory cards. It will ONLY read standard SD cards! For some this might not be a huge issue but for me this was a no-go and I returned the unit. I was quite upset that nowhere on the packaging did it say that SDHC cards were not supported and since these types of memory cards have been out on the market for quite some time not mentioning this tiny detail is somewhat deceptive.
Memory card compatibilities aside I did find that the SmartDisk ultimately did a decent job with the simple task of getting photos off of your memory card and onto something with enough space for extended trips away from your notebook or desktop computer. Especially if cost is a factor then this type of solution might be just what you are looking for.
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