Out-of-office backup
I’m heading off up to the UK’s newest National Park, The Cairngorms for a break soon and decided to replace my exceedingly slow old backup drive with a brand-spanking-new model.
The issue with the old device was, while it was USB2 compatible it was only really USB1 speed. Transferring of data was at about 1Mb/sec on a good day. Which is very slow if you’ve just finished all your picture labelling for the day and want to make a backup before going for dinner. It’s unlikely to make your wife love you more.
I typically shoot at least 1Gb (often 2 to 6Gb) a day and the result was a delay of 15 minutes to well over an hour while the backup took place. It could take even longer if I used ChronoSync for verified backups - incidentally, this is an excellent product and I do highly recommend using it with verification.
The replacement I chose was a Western Digital MyBook Passport, a 320Gb model. I’m unlikely to fill 320Gb at the moment but the price is so reasonable (about £70) that it seemed a good idea to plan for the future. What with the new 50D probably having RAW files at around 20Mb each and perhaps a 5D Mk2 with files around 30Mb each. I’ve been known to take 1,000 shots in 3 days before, so a two week break could result in a large number of files. Even more for a full-on week of dedicated outdoor photography.
So far, the drive itself is impressive. It’s tiny and very quiet. I can just hear it but my working environment is pretty silent most of the time. In a normal office you’d not hear it. The other good news is that it works fine off the USB port of my MacBook. Some people have commented that older machines don’t supply enough power for these drives - that’s old Macs and Windows PCs.
My MacBook is one of the newer models with space for 4Gb of RAM and purchased a few months back (April/May 2008). Although the picture shows the mains plugged in, it will also work off the Mac’s battery power. I’ve not run any tests on how long the Mac lasts in this configuration but I would think it’s going to reduce battery life quite a lot. Either way it’s a huge benefit for me as the old drive needed its own power supply.
Performance wise, the new drive is a huge improvement. The RAW transfer speed is around 20Mb/sec on write, 30Mb/sec on read and 10Mb/sec when using verified copy in ChronoSync. So that’s at least an order of magnitude faster than the old drive. Meaning 1 hours becomes 6 minutes or less.
The drive comes formatted to FAT32 but re-formatting to the Mac file system took 19 seconds (!) and I’ve had no issues as a result of the change over.
Connection wise, the drive only has a single port and 1 light. The port is a standard Mini-B USB connector - the kind of thing Garmin GPS units and Nokia phones use. The light indicates power and flashes for read/write access. All pretty simple but it works and provides all the information you need.
All-in-all I’d highly recommend one of these drives. They even come in lots of funky colours, including white. However, I’ll see if my opinion stays the same after the break in Scotland and some serious, practical use of the device.
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