I have been reading an old thread about digital chart storage on
remote usb drives.

A lot of speculation about power consumption and particularly
hardiness.

If you purchase a hard drive based Mp3 player such as an iPod or
creative system you get it all done for you. The software can be setup
to recognise the attached unit as disk storage in the same way that a
traditional drive can, the power consumption has been engineered to a
minimum, they are significantly 'hardened' against rough treatment
and .....
you get a music store for all those bulky cd's as well.

Our ipod has 40 gig of storage and currently about 5000 song
recordings on it. Theres still 2/3 free on the disk!

Ian

Flash storage is cheap, quite a LOT cheaper than fiddling with USB cables to
an mp3 player. Not to mention being a lot more reliable. I can't imagine
an mp3 player with spinning media, LCD screen and various other components
is going to be anywhere near as low-power as a flash chip.

On 25 Oct 2007 20:01:10 -0700, nimbusgb wrote:

I have been reading an old thread about digital chart storage on
remote usb drives.

A lot of speculation about power consumption and particularly
hardiness.

Any half way modern laptop will have plenty of space on the hard disk
for digital charts. I have the NOAA raster charts for the entire
country plus a few Canadian charts in a little over 1 GB. For backup,
CDROMs are more than adequate.

nimbusgb wrote:
I have been reading an old thread about digital chart storage on
remote usb drives.

A lot of speculation about power consumption and particularly
hardiness.

If you purchase a hard drive based Mp3 player such as an iPod or
creative system you get it all done for you. The software can be setup
to recognise the attached unit as disk storage in the same way that a
traditional drive can, the power consumption has been engineered to a
minimum, they are significantly 'hardened' against rough treatment
and .....
you get a music store for all those bulky cd's as well.

Our ipod has 40 gig of storage and currently about 5000 song
recordings on it. Theres still 2/3 free on the disk!

Ian

I carry around digital vector charts of the whole world on a 2gb flash
drive.

The problem is that the device is so small that it is easily lost, so I have
attached an oversize lanyard to it so that it can be fished out of pockets
etc. without having to scrumble around among the other crap which finds it's
way into one's pockets these days.

The charts are all backed up 2 or 3 times on Cd-Rom and DVD-Rom.

Dennis.