Rugged USB flash stick

[Aidan Wilson]

The Corsair site lists some retailers, I went and followed one of the 
links and found a US price of 78.90 for the 32GB version. Not too bad if 
you ask me. Depending on what you're doing and what sort of formats you're 
using, 32GB could be plenty of space to backup your data for a treacherous 
journey back from wherever.

Another useful device, which apparently hasn't been copied by other 
manufacturers is the XS-drive (http://www.xs-drive.com/), which is 
basically a hard drive which has the ability to suck all the data from a 
recording device without going through a computer. I think all you need to 
do is put in a CF or SD card and hit 'backup'. They have a regular 2.5" 
SATA hard drive inside, which makes them unfortunately susceptible to 
failures and breakages from dropping, etc., but if you were cashed up 
enough, you could buy a 2.5" SATA solid state drive of comparable capacity 
to make it more secure. The only failure point then, would be the 
connectors from the SATA drive to the shell.

In case you're wondering about this last option, solid state 2.5" hard 
drives cost about 350.00 (AUD) for 128GB. Probably not a viable option 
just yet, but they're due to dramatically fall in price as they soon get 
to fit more GB per square inch into a 2.5" drive bay sized space. If you 
think about it, 32GB compact flash cards are almost cheap enough now to 
make them worthwhile, so it shouldn't be long at all.

-- 
Aidan Wilson

The University of Sydney
+612 9036 9558
+61428 458 969
aidan.wilson at usyd.edu.au


On Thu, 14 May 2009, James Crippen wrote:

> This thing looks like it could stand up to some serious fieldwork
> abuse and still work just fine. It might serve as a good backup
> device, even better than recording to CD-Rs. And with sizes up to 32
> GB you could keep an awful lot of audio recordings on it. It also
> seems to have a very fast read-write speed, so you can use it with
> larger files more easily.
>
> http://www.corsair.com/products/survivor/default.aspx
>
> Their website doesn't list (for me) any places to buy it, but Google
> gives plenty of results. Also here's a good review of the device,
> which includes links to retailers:
>
> http://www.everythingusb.com/corsair_flash_survivor_gt_8gb_12805.html
>
> Perhaps you could tuck one or two emergency matches into the case as well...
>
> Cheers,
> James
>