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What's the most practical storage device nowadays, espcially in terms of price and memory space?

Someone told me that Compact Flash cards are one of the cheapest around, and they give you large memory space. The one I'm familiar with the most are the Sony Memory Sticks.

You seem to be asking about memory cards/flash cards. CF cards allow the largest amount of storage, up to 4 gigs (and expensive). You can get micro drives that fit in a CF II slot as well.

Memory stick prices are coming down but size is somewhat limited.

It seems that cameras with larger pixel counts are sticking with CF cards, compact cameras are going a number of directions. Prices on all types are coming down.

As far as maximum storage for your money, you can't beat a portable hard drive, 20 gigs for < $200US. Just get enough cards to get you through the typical day, download at night.

levelfour wrote:What's the most practical storage device nowadays, espcially in terms of price and memory space?

Someone told me that Compact Flash cards are one of the cheapest around, and they give you large memory space. The one I'm familiar with the most are the Sony Memory Sticks.

Sony's memory stick technology is size limited (128 MB for the original spec and 512 MB for the new, second generation spec), as well as speed limited (150 kb/sec for the original and 20 mb/sec for the new spec).

I don't know about secure digital, but it seems to be speed and size limited as well.

the Compact Flash (cf) cards seem to be the most open technology. The size keeps getting bigger (there probably is a ceiling somewhere), and the speeds keep getting faster (again, there probably is a ceiling, but Lexar is at 40x right now (that's 40x150kb/sec)). I like open standards, and CFcards seem to be mostly open technology.

careful abt if your camera is able to accept type I or II tho'...
and abt the FAT32 on CF above 2GB

Compact flash cards can be found up to 4 GB right now. Lexar's write acceleration technology (i.e. 40x) is proprietary to Lexar and unless the camera's firmware is set up to take advantage of it, it will not be able to take advantage of it.

I'd recomend a very cost effective solution. Go get a portable storage device such as V-MP3H Digital Data Player. Any capacity 2,5 HDD is easily fitted inside. I plugged in a 20Gb Fujitsu. Now, there's no need whatsoever to buy a pricey CF. 256M is more than adequate. You got it full, just dump all the stuff onto the disk, erase CF and use it over and over again. The whole set, box + HDD cost me about 400$. See the idea?