I need YOUR advice - JOBO Giga One Ultra

[rringsell]

Hi guys,

Im off in a few weeks on a 5/6 week trip around Europe with my camera. I have an Acer Ferrari One netbook which I am somewhat reluctant to take considering the £400 price tag. It would be used mainly to move the photo's from the SD's to internal HD and an external HD. It would give the benefit of being able to post-process that evening and allows me an internet connection for the trip. My concerns lie with not wanting to take something else that is so valuable on my trip as it will be spent in hostels and sleeping in couchette's on trains.

I have found a JOBO Giga One ULTRA Portable Storage Device for a reasonable price and it looks like it would do the job for me. The amount of images I will be taking over 6 weeks means buying individual SD cards is not really a real solution financially, but risking them all in one place seems like a large risk.

I am looking for any user opinions of this particular backup drive and any others that I should be aware of. I have searched but found little related specifically to this.

JOBO Giga ONE 80Gb Ultra

As always the your input is always welcome.

 

[TonyH]

you could just take a lot of cards?

 

[rringsell]

you could just take a lot of cards?

At around 500 shots a day equating to roughly 4GB/day shooting RAW, the cheapest I could do that would be £252.

Using play.com class 6 4gb cards Play.com (UK) : Play.com 4GB SD HC Class 6 Card (Triple Pack) : Electronics - Free Delivery

42 days / 3 cards = 14.

14 x £18 = £252.


Ok so it wouldn't be quite as much as that as I have some SanDisk Extreme III's already but its not really a viable solution. I appreciate the input though.

 

[Johnmcl7]

What camera are you shooting with? 5 x 16GB class 4 cards would only be 100 pounds which is well below the Jobo, I'd think even if you're machine gunning the entire day you're still going to be waiting on a class 6 card anyway. If class 6 cards are a must, even 5 x 16GB class 6 SDHC cards are less than the Jobo and that's quite a manageable amount.

The problem with the Jobo and other units like that for me is that you're entirely trusting the unit to be working properly because there's no way you can verify it yourself. Also as far as I'm aware they use a standard hard drive rather than solid state memory which makes them more vulnerable to bangs and knocks.

When I was in a similar position I used an Archos device, at the time its 160GB capacity (8GB was about £50 at the time I think) was well above any cards I could carry and it had the advantage that I could check the files after they were copied. I don't know if the newer units offer any raw viewing capability though, personally I wouldn't trust copying my files to a hard drive based device with no display.

John

 

[rringsell]

Thanks for the reply John. I have found a 120GB Jobo for £80

Im shooting with Nikon D40 which from memory is 5MBish per RAW file, roughly 130 / GB. In all honesty, I probably don't need too many high speed cards in my bag as I already own some very good cards. If I was continuous shooting then I could use these. Im estimating at 500 as this seems to be an average of what I take in normal shoots, in the UK.

Your concerns with the Jobo are exactly the same as mine. Not being able to see the images have been transferred without any corruption scares me to say the least and you are quite correct it is not a SSD, but a standard HD that is inside as we know prone to bumps.

The problem I then have is when I start looking at colour screen models, you are getting into the price range of the netbook I already own anyway which offers much more functionality (with the downside the space). Jobo have a few models as do Hyperdrive but they are beginning to creep into the £300/£400 bracket.

A compromise may be the £80 Jobo, with maybe 30GB of SD cards. I could backup to the drive every few days then find an internet cafe and backup onto a 2.5" HDD. This then begs the question why have the Jobo in the first place and not just backup where I can.

The dilemmas

 

[weetsie]

whats your reason for shooting raw exclusively? jpegs would obviously save alot of space.

and are you REALLY going to be shooting 500 a day?

 

[rringsell]

whats your reason for shooting raw exclusively? jpegs would obviously save alot of space.

and are you REALLY going to be shooting 500 a day?

I shoot RAW as I like the control I have in post-processing. I largely take architectural shots and shadow features heavily. Shooting in RAW allows me to explore this depth and detail more so than jpeg.

Any yeah, I have been known to go snappy happy. It will probably be nearer the 350-400mark per day but its not unknown for me to shoot 600+. I guess its the joy of not having to pay for film, I can shoot as much as I please.

 

[Calzor Suzay]

I have a similar no name HK special which takes on all cards and sucks it into the unit. From the photos I've seen the LCD panel looks the same.

I bought it not the for DSLR but for backing headcam footage out of a ContourHD 1080p, at 720p 60fps it can quickly rack up some footage so I needed somewhere to offload it and didn't want to cart my laptop about like yourself.

Downsides are you're never quite sure it's actually copied the data, the only indication I got was the amount of space left went down, each time you sync it just creates a new folder and dumps the data, the instructions are a bad translation at times so you have to fiddle to get the gist of it, when inserting the memory cards you have to be careful as the slots are multi use so it's not just a case of shove it in and it all lines up.

Saying that though I found it brilliant for offloading the 8gb micro SD cards I had from helmet cam footage whilst in Austria snowboarding, I also backed up the DSLR cards to it but never deleted the data, also took 2 other friends cameras cards and backed their photos up as well.

All in all it worked if a little fiddly, it wants a lot of juice being a HDD so don't expect to charge, bugger off into the mountains and backup all your cards. If it was a once in the lifetime trip or I was a wedding tog I'm not sure I'd rely on it 100% though, maybe as a backup but not the only source

 

[rringsell]

Thanks for the replys.

Ive decided on taking the netbook and a separate HDD to backup. Ill keep the best shots on separate 8GB SD's on my person.

Thanks for the replys as always. Much appreciated.