Home ·· News Room ·· Prints ·· Licensing ·· Gallery ·· About Us ·· Contact Us ·· Equipment ·· Services Flash-HD to Go! (40GB) February 10, 2006
	So we've purchased a few 1 GB compact flash cards and then realize that won't even come close to storing all the photos for a three week China trip.  What does one do?  You have to either go with a portable CD burner like the Roadtripper or a portable hard disk like the Flash-HD to Go from Media Gear. The Flash-HD to Go! (40GB) is small and doesn't weigh too much. We chose this device over the popular Tripper, ImageTank and such because this was the only unit available at local stores in San Diego.  Also, several units were unavailable on B&H and Adorama, so it really didn't matter. Flash-HD to Go! 40GB Buy it here 12-14-04 -  This product worked perfectly as advertised during a three week trip to China in October.  It was scary to have to erase compact flash (CF) cards after storing them on this unit but there were no problems during the transfer to a computer.  Each time the download button was pressed, a new directory was made and the entire contents of the CF or SD/MMC card was transfered.  Each type of card is placed into a different directory and under those directories,  a sequential directory is created. It would have been more wise to have two units for real backup in case one was destroyed or failed.  An even more paranoid backup scheme would have been to have another unit from a different vendor.  That would have been more secure. The international power adapter ordered from MediaGear worked perfectly and it came with every adapter for every country.  China has every type of power adapter in the world and not all are available in each hotel.  Plugging in the round pin type into the UK type is possible if you can defeat the ground pin lock.  You can do this by pressing something NONCONDUCTIVE into the ground socket and then stuff the round-pin into the hot and neutral.  See the below photo on the right. The unit was never run off the battery, only wall power.  Thus the battery life for number of transfers is unknown.  This experiment will be performed before the next major trip. General Information Our experiments showed that you CANNOT use a generic USB extension cable to plug in their USB cable to.  The device powers up and then shuts down!  Their cable must be plugged in directly to the computer. From talking with the tech support at MediaGear, we learned the following: - It uses a Fujitsu hard disk - When transfering files, it uses a checksum to verify the transfer. This has a consequence of slower transfers but they are more likely to be error-free. - The battery has a 500-cycle life expectancy and should run for 1.5 hours. - If you receive a Card Error... message, try reading the flash card directly on a PC, as PCs retry testy connections. This doesn't help you in the field, though. - CF cards drain the most power (3.3V), SD cards drain the least. Expect a commensurate power-on time. You should get 2-3 1GB transfers. This is untested (9-27-04). - When you shake the unit (TURNED OFF!!!) you will hear two sounds. Slight shaking with cause the head of the hard disk to rattle. They said this is normal. Any hard disk you shake will exhibit this sound. If you shake the unit a little harder, you will feel a clunking. This is from the hard disk shifting around. They said they decided to use a floating mount rather than a screw mount to absorb some shock. This will not help you if you drop it while it's on. Try that with your laptop and see what happens. Absolutely make sure you correctly disconnect this device from your computer.  After your computer has figured out what is connected to it, there is a little green arrow on top of a gray card, as can be seen at right.  On a PC, left click on this and chose Safely remove... from the system.  If the icon isn't there, a little blue arrow may need to be clicked.  The images on the right show what you should see. Sadly, their standard power adapter is not rated for 100-240V world universal power.  I called about a universal power adapter that will work in any country and got a very friendly salesman who provided me with the link and order information. Buy it here
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