Gadget Corner - LaCie Mobile Hard Drive

by Patty Hankins and Bill Lawrence

We’re just back from a photography trip down to Florida – we spent time at the J.N. “Ding” Darling National Wildlife Refuge, Big Cypress National Preserve, and the Audubon Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary. This time of year provides great opportunities for photographing birds and interesting landscapes. We knew we’d be taking lots of photos - we wound up taking a couple of thousand digital photographs between the two of us, and we’re still working on sorting.

When we travel, we bring several micro drives for in-camera storage, and a small laptop for photo storage, rough weeding of the photos (when we have time), and of course to keep in touch by e-mail. However, one concern we had was what if something happened to the laptop? We’ve had several hard drives go bad without warning in the past, and of course someone could always break into the car and steal the laptop. We’d hate to lose all our photos from this trip, so we decided to invest in a back-up drive for the laptop.

Before we get into details, we should note that this is for our laptop used during travel – we have multiple backups of our home storage. If you keep digital photos on your computer, do you have them backed up on another storage device (hard disk, cd, dvd, etc)? If not, we HIGHLY recommended doing it, now.

We decided to buy a LaCie 40GB Mobile Hard Drive for our backup. This drive is quite easy to use, and if you want, all you need do is take it out of the box and plug it into your computer, and it works. The physical drive is 3” wide x 5” long x 5/8” tall, making it bigger than a deck of cards but smaller than a small paperback book. It comes with its own USB cable, and a small bag to store the drive in. This drive has a USB 2.0 interface and runs off your computer’s power supply (through the USB port). It doesn’t need any installed drivers, you just plug it in a USB port and it shows up as another drive on your computer. At least it works this way for Windows XP, which is what we use, and according to the manufacturer, it also works this way for Windows 2000 and Mac OS X. For the technologically inclined – it comes formatted as a FAT 32 volume, and we took a couple of minutes to reformat it to NTFS since all of our machines run Windows XP – supposedly this improves performance, but it is not necessary. No software installation is necessary.

We used it in Florida as our backup drive. Each day, we would download the day’s files to the computer, and then copying the files to the LaCie drive from the computer’s hard disk. The next day, we would take the laptop with us (in case we wanted to download midday), and leave the hard drive in the hotel room. It took only a few minutes to transfer the files from our laptop to the backup drive.

Once we got home, we only had to plug the LaCie drive into our desktop computer to transfer photos, rather than transferring files direct from the laptop to the desktop over a network. Copying about 30 GB worth of photo files took under 30 minutes (sorry – we didn’t time it) – this would have taken a couple of nights completely occupying our wireless network.

Why the LaCie drive, as opposed to other brands? We’ve had pretty good luck with LaCie, and the price was reasonable (we got ours off the web for about $90). The main thing is to have something that you can back up your files to while you’re on the road. This is highly recommended if you are taking a number of digital photos on the road, and need a little peace of mind that you will still have the photos when you get back, even if something happens to your computer.

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