I have a digital camera and am now looking into portable storage devices. It's a nifty little hard drive (20-40GB) that accepts a digital camera card (CF, SD) and let's you store the photos there and free the camera card. Anyone have any experience with these? Preferred brands?

The X's Drive II, VP2160 it just perfect. It does what it claims to do and costs about 50€ without a drive.

It's been almost 4 months since this question was posed. In that time a whole slew of new tech toys have come out. Rather than going out and buying 5 more 256 MB SD cards I think I'd prefer to get a device that I could upload my shots to, then reuse the card. I don't want to lug my laptop around. What have you guys seen (bought) that is less than $300 that I might use to directly transfer my photos? The Creative Zen video sounds fantastic but the price is over my budget and it doesn't look like it has an SD card reader built in.

The VP2160 is still a good choice. Didn't fail one single time up to now. Incl. a 80GB disk it'll cost you $180

Thanks Logos. Now you got me thinking about maybe putting out more bucks and getting the 40GB Vosonic X's Drive Super VP6230 VP6230-40GB. I like the idea of being able to view the photos on the screen and maybe loading a video for the trip. It runs about $300 but I really don't know anything about the company's rep. I couldn't find any reviews at Cnet.com.

Dual purpose use. Son used his IPod to upload pictures daily while on a trip.

iPods can do that?

It's a hard drive.

1 gig and 2 gig cards are now very affordable....thats an awful lot of high res pics !!

I thought about that Marko, but for some wierd reason my two year old Nikon has a problem with any SD card bigger than 256 MB. Normally I can rapid fire my pictures with anything up to 256 MB, but when I put in a 512 MB or 1 Gig card, the camera takes 1-3 seconds between shots.

I suppose I should consider another camera, but this Nikon Coolpix is just so easy to use and takes excellent photos. The only negative feature (other than the memory card problem) is the tiny LCD screen.

Geez, now you guys have me think AGAIN. I guess I'll search through CNET for their digital camera ideas.

I vote for the iPod solution - multitasking!

Well, I've got 3 512M cards and a 1G card for my trip this summer. Now, that may seem like plenty, but last summer I was taking 300 photos a day. This is a two week trip to Ireland.

Too many, you say? Well, my goal is to have the sales of last year's photos pay for next year's trip, so I shoot at high res (3.2M camera) and a 512M card holds about 330 photos. So I'd run through my 'store' in about 5 days. Need something to bank them in, and I don't particularly want to lug my DH's laptop around.

I don't have an iPod, but I'm seriously looking into one of these:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...%3AIT&rd=1

Any thoughts?

Seems to me they're all the same (same chips) except for some small modifications. I guess it will break if I drop it, but mine is quite solid. It uses cellphone batteries, which is great if you're looking for a replacement. It works on my XP box as well as on my Mac, no drivers needed. If you plug in a card whike it's attached to the PC a new drive letter will instantly be created that contains the data from the card. At the same time the harddisk can still be accessed under its own letter. And yes, it boots my laptop too