[Leica] Cards to transfer information

[henningw at archiphoto.com (Henning Wulff)]

At 5:28 PM -0500 11/8/09, Lawrence Zeitlin wrote:
>Mark asks:
>"I have a question. As I now have a slot on the left of my laptop for sd
>
>disks and  its more convenient than logic would indicate.
>
>
>Can I use a card like a flash drive? Do people do that?
>
>It seems cheaper, smaller and more convenient then those plug in things for
>
>transferring information of the digital sort not just pix and movies."
>
>
>- - - - - -
>
>Sure you can. As you told me, a 2 GB card costs about the same as a package
>of cigarettes. As a non-smoker I wouldn't know what a pack of cigarettes
>cost but my smoking friends tell me it costs a lot. But far more convenient
>are those little thumb drives that you plug into the USB ports. Your MacBook
>has two USB ports. The thumb drives cost even less than SD cards. More
>important, they fit just about every computer made in the last 10 years,
>even those without SD slots. And that, in fact, may be the answer to my
>question about computer hard drives. Three or four 16 GB thumb drives,
>costing about $20 each, will give me all the back up storage capacity I
>need.
>
>Larry Z
>


They don't put fast memory/controllers in those USB drives. They tend 
to be extremely slow.

Get some fast class 6 cards to use in your camera (Trascend are good 
value) and a couple of hard drives like the WD Passports for your 
image files and backups. Cheaper per Gb and less waiting. When I 
travel with my wife one drive goes in my suitcase and one in hers. If 
you're extra worried, get some more drives. 500Gb for a little over a 
hundred dollars and they're quite small.

You need an extremely powerful magnetic field at the surface of the 
disks to affect the data. The write head can do that because it is a 
lot less than the diameter of a human hair away from the surface. If 
you're on the order of multi million times as far away when creating 
the magnetic field, as scanners and x-ray machines would be, and you 
have to penetrate the shielding on the drive as well, the magnetic 
field has to be extremely strong. You can't have fields like that 
around people who may have steel pins in their bones or strange 
jewelry in their tongues and noses, not to mention pacemakers etc. 
You might also pull the nails out of the woodwork.

Hard drives are in no danger.

If, on the other hand, a star in our arm of the galaxy goes supernova 
and is oriented incorrectly and thus shoots a gamma ray burst at us, 
all bets are off. But in an event like that, losing pictures from a 
hard drive won't be amongst the 1000 most important worries.

-- 

    *            Henning J. Wulff
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