a fast, reliable, portable hard drive

[br.avery]

Can anyone suggest a fast, reliable, portable hard drive that will go good with my macbook and canon rebel xsi for around $100.. 320gb

and are there such things has portable hard drives with a slot to insert your memory card and automatically transfer files at a push of a button? that would be amazing and if theres not, someone should invent it!

 

[Cliff3]

Can anyone suggest a fast, reliable, portable hard drive that will go good with my macbook and canon rebel xsi for around $100.. 320gb

and are there such things has portable hard drives with a slot to insert your memory card and automatically transfer files at a push of a button? that would be amazing and if theres not, someone should invent it!

To the former, here's a link to a bus-powered Lacie 320GB USB drive for a bit under $100 on Amazon.

To the latter, they've been around for a while. With current CF card prices so cheap (I just bought a couple of 4GB UDMA cards from Lexar for $30 each after rebates) it probably makes as much sense to just buy more CF cards. Hyperdrive makes a very fast portable storage device. I have an earlier version called the Compactdrive that I no longer use. Epson makes a nice one with a beautiful screen, but when I last checked it out card transfers were slow as molasses.

 

[pdxflint]

I did a quick search on buy.com, and came up with a few you might want to look at. MacLife Mag rated the Seagate and WD portable drives as the best performers, especially if you get the dual port (USB/Firewire 400) versions.

I have the Maxtor OneTouch 4 Mini 320 usb drive, but it's selling for nearly $30 more than I paid ($79) a month ago at Fry's. It has worked as promised and powers up off the usb bus with a single cable, but I imagine all the ones in this group will serve you well. The Seagate Freeagent drives sometimes come with an optional dock, if you shop around.

If you can get the firewire option at nearl the same price, I'd go for it.