I finally got around to ordering a Compactdrive 70x as a portable storage device. I wound up buying one with an "80" gigabyte drive (80 million bytes, 74 megabytes, but who's counting...)
If anyone here is using a similar setup - a couple of questions. First, the verified write mode does not seem to work at all with SD cards. (That's the mode where the drive reads and verifies each file.) It terminates after the first file with a verification error. It works fine with CF Cards though. I have three brands of SD cards (SanDisk Ultra III, Transcend, and Dane Elec) and it works with none of these. Is anyone else using this mode with SD cards? I'm wondering if I got a bum unit. Non-verified transfers from SD cards work fine, BTW. Second - batteries. I bought this because it is supposed to work with 4 AA batteries, but my NiMH batteries seem to work on a fresh charge for a short while, but if they sit in the device for just a few hours they can't put out enough voltage. The drive poops out with a #19 error, which means no hard drive present. Oddly, it's not the #20, "Bad Batteries" error. But fresh batteries (or using the power supply) fix the problem, and checking the batteries is recommended in the manual for this error. These batteries are 1800 mAh Energizer brand, bout about 3 months ago. Granted - they have seen little use since I got them, and I'm in the process of completely draining and recharging them for a couple of cycles to see if that helps (over the last few months they have been charged, died with no use, recharged, a few times.)But I wonder if the Compactdrive can run off regular AA alkaline batteries or lithiums? The manual states that it is intended to work with NiMH rechargeable, but never says not to use alkalines. I also wonder if the large HD is draining more juice than a smaller drive would, and is dropping the battery voltage during power up and self test... Any thoughts on these problems would be appreciated. I bought a fresh set of NiMh batteries and they are in there charging now, so maybe that will solve the battery issue. - MCC -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Mark Cassino Photography Kalamazoo, Michigan www.markcassino.com - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
