I am going to Hawaii in September and I'm looking into buy a Smartdisk Flashtrax. I'm pretty much sold on this product after reading many review.

My question is - how much GB will I need? It is sold in models with 20, 30, 40 or 80GB.

If I use my camera on high resolution so that I can create great quality photos - I don't know how many pictures I can store on these models.

Thanks to all of you who know more about this than I do. Digital is pretty new to me.

First thing, if you are going to want to do high resolution photos, you will probably want to take 512mb for your camera alone, or you will be switching media cards often. For example, 128mb will get you approx. 248 pictures on normal (that is what I have), it will take approx. three times that on high resolution, maybe a bit more. Someone else might have the exact numbers.

Now for the Flashtrax, think of it like a hard drive on your computer. For example, I have a 40GB hard drive in my computer, and I have about 32.7 gb left on my hard drive, which is alot. I am running XP, Office 2003, Act, dreamweaver, photodraw, publisher, palm pilot, and even more programs I do not have time to type.

Now if you want to do the math: 1gb = one billion bytes
1 mb = one million bytes
So I would think 30 gigs would be plenty.

If this didn't help, I apologize and I hope there is someone out there who can explain it better than I. I have a hard time explaining things in writing for someone else to understand.

Find out the file size of the pictures you get on your digital camera. It depends on the resolution of your camera, compression mode and file type that you're using.

Then, you can do some divisions and find out how many pictures the hard-disk can hold.

My camera takes a is 5 Megapixel photo

For a 5 megapixel camera, a 1 GB storage card (say, a Compact Flash card) will hold somewhere around 400 pictures at highest resolution. So a 20 GB storage device should hold roughly 8,000 high-res pictures.

Hope this helps a bit!

Okay then :-? I'm sure that the 20 GB will work just fine. Especially since I can use the 3.5 screen to delete those that don't turn out. 3 weeks in Hawaii - wonder if I can take 8,000 pictures - not likely since it's my honeymoon