If you are serious about digital photography, then you’ve almost certainly found yourself without enough storage out in the field. Even though high capacity media cards are very affordable, many people end up taking more pictures with higher quality. Many digital video cameras are starting to use flash memory also, as a 2GB card can easily record over nearly two hours of stardard-definition video. You can really find yourself in a pickle when you find yourself with several of these devices, which a typical family does nowadays.
This happens to me a lot. My first digital camera came with a 16MB SmartMedia card, which didn’t hold a lot of photos. My Nikon SLRs eat up 2GB cards just as easily. I inevitably spend time feverishly deleting the photos that didn’t come out, and by the time I’m finished I’ve lost several valuable photo opportunities. If there were only a way I could download my cards when I don’t have access to a computer…
Cirago has created their new “Smart Mobile Storage” solution, which is a compact portable enclosure with everything you need to copy digital flash media directly to a standard laptop hard drive… no computer needed!
Specifications
Cirago Smart Mobile Storage is the best solution for your flash memory card(s). Compatible with PC and Mac, Smart Mobile Storage is ready to travel with you and your digital camera. This device supports a wide variety of flash cards and allows the transfer of photos, data, music and movies to the storage device by one simple touch button.
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The enclosure is about the same size as a standard 2.5” laptop hard drive and has a nice aluminum finish. There are media slots or connections on every side of the device, rather than using an all-in-one interface like several card readers employ.
On the left of the device is an On/Off button, copy button, and SD/MMC/Memory Stick slot. On the top is a large Compact Flash/MD slot, and on the right is a shared SM/XD card slot. The bottom of the device has a standard mini-USB connection, DC in port, and a red power LED. The front of the device has a small 1 inch monochrome status LCD screen with blue backlighting. Although a 5V DC adapter is included, the drive can be fully powered (and charged) by the USB connection.
The front and back of the device are secured with mini-Phillips screws, that can be removed with any small screwdriver set. If your device came with a hard drive pre-installed, then the back is secured with non-standard “Y” screws to prevent the average consumer from replacing the hard drive, which invalidates the warranty.
Any standard 2.5” ATA laptop hard drive can be used in this device, which uses standard ATA connections. Since the device uses the FAT32 file system, then you are limited to 132GB, so if you use a larger hard drive then you won’t be able to use all of the available storage.
Cirago In use
The device really is plug-and-play. Whenever the device is turned on, a brief initialization occurs where the device checks available storage space, battery life, and the capacity of any inserted media. Any new media card that’s inserted is immediately recognized, and the sum of the files (in megabytes) is displayed. There were a few times when inserted media was not recognized, but cycling the power on the device always did the trick.
To copy any (and all) inserted media, you simply press the “Copy” button. The LCD then displays a percentage bar, and a simple animation begins (which mimics Windows’ copy animation of small folders being whisked away to a hard drive). The drive capacity only updates once the copy process is done, or a media card is removed prematurely.
Some digital cameras use the same file names when a new card is inserted (DSC0001, DSC0002, etc), so a picture may have the same name as a completely different photo on another drive. Since the copy process is very simplified, how do you make sure that files aren’t accidentally overwritten?
Cirago’s solution to this problem is to create a new directory every time the copy button is pressed. If you press the copy button three times with the same card installed, then you will have 3 separate directories, all containing the same data. This ensures that data is never overwritten, but can also waste space if you have to pull out the card or turn the device off.
Cirago’s 10GB Smart Mobile Storage’s internal copy performance and USB performance was tested not only to determine how useful it is in the field, but how usable it is as a general storage solution. The device was tested using HDTach’s hard drive benchmark 3.0 to benchmark USB throughput, and internal copy performance was tested by measuring the time taken to copy a certain volume of files.
It didn’t matter whether we used SD, XD, or Compact Flash cards, the copy time was still relatively the same, yielding 1.4MB a second, which is still under the specified 2.0MB a second listed on the package. We can only conclude that the problem is in the device’s card interface, because even the slow 10GB hard drive is over eight times faster than that. Even at an optimistic 2MB data rate, it would take 16 minutes to unload a 2GB card.
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At that performance, you should still schedule some “down time” if you only have 1 media card for each device. The best way to leverage your time would be to have two cards, and switch to another one while the first is being copied.
USB performance was a little better, but not nearly at the level of most USB drives. HDTach reported the transfer rate at about 8GB a second, which doesn’t even come close to saturating USB 2.0. It could possibly be that this is the most the included 10GB drive can deliver, and you may have better results with a large 120GB hard drive. Even a modern flash drive is able to deliver around 10MB a second. If a 120GB drive in this device could deliver 12GB a second or more, then our tune may change, but based on the current performance, this device isn’t very useful as a general external storage solution.
This device really isn’t that expensive, considering what you get. The 10GB version retails for $69, and 120GB version retails for $149, with the bare enclosure costing $50. The unit will pretty much cost the same whether you buy the hard drive separately or pre-installed.
This device is aimed at the consumer with lots of digital devices that needs a portable digital depository. Its usefulness becomes severely limited by some rather slow copy times. This device could be invaluable for a “super-consumer” of digital devices, as long as you come prepared with spare media. For the digital professional, time is money, and this device is just too slow.
Even if you have backup media, you shouldn’t have to remember to check on the copy in fifteen minutes. If you find yourself out in the field (or on vacation) and have no other way to offload your cards, then the Cirago Smart Mobile Storage solution is better than deleting your photos.
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