: Since it doesn't mention storage capacity : Is it just a reader and you still have to hook a hard drive up to it? And : what powers the hard drive out in the field? yup, it's just the case. It has an external battery pack, loaded with AA batteries though I'll probably pop NiMh 's or make up a rechargeable lithium cell pack for it. The beauty of just buying it as a case is 1 - it's cheap * and 2. you can bang in whatever brand of hdd you want** re 'cheap'(*) I had a friend just buy a seagate external hdd the other day for 350 local dollars with a 160G hdd enclosed in it. Local prices for the internal 160Gb drive are around $120 (for seagates and the better WD's) while external cases retail at as low as $50 which gives you some pretty stylish lines. Anyone can screw the drive inside the case for $170 and save themselves quite a bit of money. of course the other upside to going DIY is that you have the knowledge then to be able to pop the case open and switch in a brand new drive once the old one is full - beats unnecessarily buying new cases every time:-) re 'whatever brand' (**) above, many of the 'off the shelf' external drives that get poor reviews seem to have slow IDE drives aboard with little cache memory, the same happens of course if you were to stick in a junk drive yourself. Buying something like a fast Western Digital with reasonable cache onboard gives you a superior product. the external power supply idea does seem a bit clumsy and they're probably doing it to make the case as small as possible, but to be honest I'll probably repack the whole thing in a new case with internal power as well as an external power jack - the only thing really worthy of comment regarding this drive case is that it's a USB interface rather than CF only, or CF/SD/whatever ..so you can even pop in a usb memory stick/pen drive and back that up too (with the click of a button), as well as any future memory devices that are introduced to future markets. k
