Comments on: Smartdisk Photobank

By: cricalix

cricalix — Sat, 28 Apr 2007 13:43:35 +0000

Based on a question received via e-mail, I shall comment for posterity (and search engines). The question related to how fast the Photobank could copy data from a flash card – I was given a comparison time of 15m, 43s for copying a 1 GB card (3.5 MB files) with a Vosonic X Drive II.

So, being a friendly person, I pulled out the card that’d I’d been using recently, and proceeded to copy the data off. 23 minutes flat to copy 1,796,160,300 bytes, or 1.3 MB/s. Not blazing fast, but I use multiple 2 GB SD (Sandisk Extreme III) cards with the D80, so I can afford the downtime on a single card. I suspect the speed relates to internal powersaving, as there’s no way the hard drive is that slow.

By: cricalix

cricalix — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 15:50:42 +0000

Ireland – I don’t own a PSP, so I can’t comment accurately. However, the unit is essentially 7 or 8 card readers in one device, so if the PSP uses one of the formats mentioned in the review, the Photobank should be able to copy the files FROM the card.

The unit does not have the ability (that I’ve seen) to transfer files from disk TO the cards – other than with a computer on the far end of the USB cable (i.e., Windows), at which point the OS is doing the work, not the Photobank.

By: Ireland

Ireland — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 13:40:16 +0000

Brilliant review. I bought one of these on the internet and it has’nt arrived yet but i have a question before it does. The official ps2 magazine advertised this product in its ‘The best bits ‘n’ bobs for your psp’ section. It says although the device is primarily designed for transferring snaps to and from digital cameras it will connect to the psp and recognise the memory stick. It goes on to explain that using the controls on the photobank, you can then tranfer movies you encoded yourself along with music, photos or whatever digital media you want. Is this true because i am very worried after spending 170 euros on this that it cant. Any help please?

By: Col

Col — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 13:24:54 +0000

Fantastic, many thanks for checking for me!

By: cricalix

cricalix — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 12:23:23 +0000

Col – It copied the entire contents of my CF card, without bothering to check what it was. I copied a 119 MB AVI to the card using a standard card reader, then hit the copy button on the Photobank, and it happily copied the data across.

By: cricalix

cricalix — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 09:46:28 +0000

Col – I’ll test that when I get home tonight and amend another comment onto this entry. A wild guess is that it copies anything, as it replicated the dcim/100km028/ structure into /cards/cf00001/dcim/100km028/.

By: Col

Col — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 09:30:11 +0000

Excellent review, I’ve been looking at one of these myself. What I can’t find anywhere though is a description of what files the photobank will copy from the memory cards – does it just copy everything on the card over (so for example if I had put some word documents on it then it’d copy them as well) or does it just do for example jpegs? The only thing stopping me going for it is that I need to confirm that it’ll copy RAW and movie files (avi/mov/mpeg) from the memory card as well as just the photos.
Any help on the above would be greatly appreciated.

By: cricalix

cricalix — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 19:26:19 +0000

I suspect it’s a standard laptop drive, possibly with rubber grommets to absorb some impact. Powered down drives have a 50+ G rating as far as I remember, so it’s only shock when the unit is operating that’d be a major concern.

With the advances showing up in the flash arena, one might expect to see a 20 GB NVRAM unit showing up in the near future. Early adopter costs will be high (aren’t they always?), but at least the physical shock aspect wouldn’t be an issue any more.

By: Nabil

Nabil — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 18:40:10 +0000

Right on :). Since I already have an iPod, I’ve been more inclined to go the route of a card reader for it, rather than a separate digital wallet, but it sounds like a fairly worthwhile solution. One question I would be asking is about how ruggedized you know or suspect the drive is (having had portable drives catastrophically fail, it’s a perennial question).

Be well, man, keep in touch.

By: cricalix

cricalix — Sun, 06 Aug 2006 17:37:49 +0000

Additional speed information – I copied the 9 GB of data from the weekend’s shooting off on my Linux server at an average of 7 MBytes/second, about 1 image per second.