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Ever since Ben pointed it out in the comments, I've been intrigued by the Wolverine SixPac, a portable, self-powered USB hard drive that includes a CF reader (as well as for other five other types of data cards, hence the name). First things first: right now, the Austin Fry's has the 20GB model for $199, and when I left there an hour ago, they still had five or six on the shelf. (In the hard drive department.)
So how does it hold up? It's a little bigger than I expected (maybe 3.5x the volume of my cell phone, or 2x the volume of a bulkier cell phone), but it fits snugly in my Domke bag, so it doesn't matter. It has two buttons: "Power" and "Copy". The copy button just clones the contents of whatever media card you have into a folder on the Wolverine; for Compact Flash cards, you'll get "CF0001", "CF0002", etc. It appears to start renumbering if you delete the old folders, but I haven't thoroughly tried that yet. One potentially irritating feature is that it beeps when starting and ending the copy, which -- in quieter locales -- may lead to frustration. But still, in terms of "does it do what I need without being a pain in the ass," the answer appears to be: yes.
Of even more interest is the timing dimension. This table gives the times to copy 256MB of data, which is half of my CF card's storage capacity.
| CF to Wolverine:
| 4:01 minutes
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| Wolverine to PowerBook
| 0:54 minutes
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| CF to PowerBook
| 1:49 minutes
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(The CF card in question is a 512MB SanDisk Ultra II, and the direct copy from CF to PB is via a stock SanDisk USB2 card reader. Also, this is just a straight copy, not an import into iPhoto or any other photo program.)
So the main downside is that it takes almost twice as long to copy the CF onto the Wolverine as it would be to directly copy to the PowerBook, assuming I want to haul my PowerBook along with me (which I have done from time to time). A full card would take eight minutes, which is a non-trivial amount of time. I get some of that time back on the back-end, with the zippy transfer to computer, but then again, I have more time to kill in post-processing :).
(It's also worth pointing out that I don't know how long the battery will last in practice; specifically, how many GB can I copy over from CF to Wolverine before exhausting it? Supposedly it gets 1.6 hours on a full charge, which would be about 12 8-minute copies, or about 6GB of effective usage. But even 4GB of real usage would be great; see discussion below about RAW.)
This begs the question: is it worth it? After all, another CF card like I have seems to run about $100 after judicious online ordering; for this price, I could have bought two more of those, and surely that would have filled all of my film roll needs going forward. (Insert gallows laugh.) I think it is worth it, for two reasons:
- My camera's battery capacity far outstrips my memory capacity; I can do at least two full runs of 512MB on one charge, and have an extra battery in the pack. When we travel, I anticipate using that battery capacity.
- That damnable rogue Pete Su has got me all enamored with shooting RAW; which is to say, in the camera's native, unprocessed format, which has several advantages (most notably, the ability to do staggering amounts of exposure compensation after the fact) but has the important disadvantage of taking up twice as much space.
If I start shooting RAW, I'd need at least 2GB of storage, and probably more, to feel comfortable with my footage capacity. So why not plan for the future?
It remains to be seen whether or not the download times drive me crazy. I do have some substantially smaller cards that I can swap in during the copy, and that may be all I need, but I guess I figure that 8 minutes is better than driving home or walking back to the hotel. I may also find that I just do opportunistic copies as we walk, without actually filling up the card. But being able to stick this thing in my camera bag and thereby increase my storage space 40-fold seems overall like a win. I give it two carpal-tunnel-riddled thumbs up. 7:06:50 PM () 
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