Peripherals

Seagate, a leading developer of hard drives, has a new range of 'Photo Hard Drives' that boast higher resistance to vibration and impact shock and are compatible with most DSLR cameras with CF slots. The new Seagate Photo Hard Drives are available in 4GB and 8GB capacities and both require a CompactFlash Type II card slot. The company claims it has used a new drive architecture that maintains data integrity and protects the drive against drops or falls.

The drives are quoted as withstanding operating shocks up to 1500G (gravitation constant) at 1ms (milliseconds) and vibration of up to 1G at 5-500 Hz. In effect, this means they need to be handled more carefully than solid-state memory cards, although they are reasonably shock and vibration resistant. No software was supplied with the 8GB Seagate Photo Hard Drive, which comes with a one-year warranty (unlike solid-state memory cards which are warranted for extended periods).

Interested purchasers should consider the plusses and minuses associated with using a high-capacity microdrive. The biggest plus is the huge number of images you can store. With the 10.3-megapixel Nikon D200, this equated to more than 520 NEF-RAW files or over 1200 high-resolution JPEGs. For the 6-megapixel EOS 300D, it was equivalent to 1142 RAW files or more than 2500 high-resolution JPEGs. Even the most enthusiastic shooters should be satisfied with these capacities as they allow you to take full advantage of RAW+JPEG shooting if your camera supports it.

Another significant benefit is cost. At an RRP of $449, the cost per gigabyte for the Seagate 8GB Photo Hard Drive is just over $56, which is roughly half the price of the cheapest 1GB CompactFlash card, roughly a third of the price of a high-speed 2GB CF card and less than a quarter of the price of an 8GB CF card.

However, on the minus side, microdrives have much slower read/write times than flash memory cards. At best, typical write speeds are roughly two-thirds the speed of a fast CF card; at worst, significantly slower. Whether you would find the relatively slow write speeds annoying depends on your shooting preferences. Regular users of burst mode are more likely to be irritated by slow write speeds, whereas if you take one shot at a time, the delay between when the shot is captured and displayed on the camera's LCD will probably be too brief to be relevant.

Test Results

We tested the new 8GB drive on our recent trip to Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego and Antarctica, where its high capacity was particularly handy at times when we were unable to download shots to a PC. In our tests, both in the field and on the bench, the drive performed well. At no time did we have any problems with data transfer, either within a camera or from camera to PC, although the slow transfer speeds were obvious when the drive was used in a slower camera like the EOS 300D. With faster DSLRs, data transfer was fast enough to be satisfactory for single shots and short bursts but long bursts were slow. The table below shows the write speeds we obtained for the four cameras we used for bench tests.

Theoretically, a microdrive should consume more power than a solid-state card, but we didn't notice any difference in battery performance during our testing. The drive itself was a fairly tight fit in the CF slots on the cameras and our notebook PC, but that didn't stop us from being able to insert and remove it quickly and easily. Consequently, we can recommend the 8GB Seagate drive to photographers who need a high-capacity card but don't require top transfer speeds.

Footnote: Six weeks after the field trial, the Seagate drive malfunctioned inexplicably while being used to transfer image files between computers.The files on the drive were non-recoverable but the 12-month warranty would ensure the drive was replaced in such an event. [28]

Interface type: CompactFlash Type II
Spindle speed: 3600rpm
Dimensions: 43 x 36 x 5mm
Weight: 18g