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SmartDisk FlashTrax: A Hard Drive for Storage in the Field
Published February 26, 2005
I made the switch to digital shooting almost two years ago. And it soon became apparent that I needed a strategy for saving my images while away from the office for a day — or a month — of shooting. Where should you put all those files?
First, let me say that my preferred — and only — method of shooting is in Raw format. While JPEG images are much smaller, the latitude, flexible white balance, and adjustability of the Raw format is too compelling to use anything else. With my current crop of EOS digital SLRs, that means each image requires about 6-9 MB of storage. When shooting wildlife, that translates into a lot of storage. In two weeks in the Falkland Islands, I shot almost 60 GB. Even after a week in Death Valley shooting the recent wildflowers (with a lot of panoramas to stitch), I came home with 14 GB of Raw images. (I process these with Capture One. More on that in a future article.)
From the beginning I decided that I wanted my images stored in (at least) two places while away on a trip. One of these is on the hard drive of my laptop, with a fast Delkin CardBus 32 adapter reader installed. I quickly decided that the backup storage should be a hard drive as well. It just didn't make sense to me to burn that many CDs (the Falklands images would span over 100 CDs). DVDs hold more. But I wanted the images somewhere where they're easily accessible and transferable.
Hard drive technology is fairly mature, and hard drive reliability is excellent, provided you treat them carefully. But they are delicate, and they can crash. Because a crash can potentially mean the loss of tremendous amounts of data (although most of it is often recoverable), you need to back them up.
In the office, I currently have two year's worth of images on a single 250 GB hard drive. Those are backed up onto a 250 GB external USB drive which is stored offsite. I plan to add another backup drive onsite. And since these are almost full, it's time for another set. But at roughly $1 per gigabyte, I think this is very cost-effective storage. (My three metal file cabinets which hold my slide pages were about $500 each.) And the ability to quickly access data on hard drives is unparalleled.
Back to the field. I have been using an 80 GB SmartDisk FlashTrax portable drive and card reader for two years and have been very pleased with it. While there are newer alternatives, I still think this is one of the best options around. Some of it's key features are
- 20, 40 or 80 GB hard drive
- built-in CompactFlash card reader
- color LCD screen
- ability to display most Raw formats
- replaceable Lithium ion battery for use in the field ($60)
- USB 2.0 interface
For long days in the field, where my 6 GB of cards might fill before I can return to our lodging and my laptop, I take the FlashTrax in a padded compartment in my photo backpack (I treat it as carefully as my camera and lenses), along with a spare battery. I've found I can download about 5-6 GB before the battery gets too low. It requires about 15 min per gigabyte. To continue shooting I then reformat my cards and continue using them.
Once I'm back in the room, I copy those downloaded images from the FlashTrax to my laptop hard drive, so they're stored in two places. This goes quickly with the FlashTrax USB 2.0connection, which renders it as just another external drive to my laptop.
Some days I get back to the room and my laptop before I've exhausted my supply of CF cards. In that case. In that case, I download my cards to my laptop first, and then transfer these images via USB to the FlashTrax as backup. Again my images are on two hard drives, and I can reformat the cards.
Why do it in this order? The USB transfer from the laptop to the FlashTrax is about 5 times faster than reading the cards directly in the FlashTrax. Also, the Cardbus 32 CompactFlash reader on my laptop is about 5 times faster than the CF reader on the FlashTrax. And finally, when the FlashTrax is connected to my laptop and registered as an external hard drive, and it's easier to move files around using the laptop interface than it is with the FlashTrax' own screen and controls.
The color LCD display on the FlashTrax is "pretty good ." For critically judging my images, e.g. sharpness, the laptop display is much better. And while there's a limited operating system and interface for manipulating files on the FlashTrax, I find it much easier to do this once it's connected to the laptop. For me, the single greatest benefit of the FlashTrax display is to simply verify that what I thought I downloaded is actually there. In a pinch, I could use it to delete obvious unsuccessful shots. And it was invaluable that time at dinner in the Falklands when nobody believed I'd gotten a killer shot of a Short-eared Owl after the sun went down.
Note to Raw file users: SmartDisk is pretty good about providing timely firmware updates from their website to accommodate new Raw file formats, as well as fix bugs and add new features.
When I bought the FlashTrax, 80 GB seemed huge. Now it seems adequate — and even tight on long trips. When I can spend time with my laptop back in the room, I try to delete as many bad images as possible. That's partly because of limited storage on my laptop (although I'll soon be adding an external USB drive to supplement that).
Do I have any complaints? The spare Lithium ion battery is pricey at $60. I once removed a card from the FlashTrax before the download was complete — not a good thing in the CompactFlash world. That in turn corrupted the directory of the FlashTrax. Fortunately I was able to get everything back by connecting it as an external drive to my laptop and running Windows Check Disk utility. And one participant arrived in the Falklands with a dead unit (although he hadn't really tried it out at home, and we stored his images as well as mine on my FlashTrax). It's not as rugged as a CompactFlash card — I'm sure it won't survive a trip through the wash.
There are some newer units which do a better job of displaying images on crisp screens, for showing off pictures of your African safari or children. But for a unit that downloads images under battery power in the field, confirms download with a color display that handles Raw files, and doubles as a USB 2.0 external hard drive, the SmartDisk FlashTrax merits a look for storage in the field.