As (semi-) professional photographers, as well as all round storage enthusiasts, there are a few things in life that are always in short supply: empty CF, SD, and XQD cards…. and storage to empty cards on to! In a perfect world when going to an extended photoshoot – be it a wedding, or just a family vacation – we would take two bags along. One for our lens and cameras, and the other filled with empty cards for those cameras.
This is not a perfect world, far from it in fact; and while we can dump a certain number of cards worth of photographs to our laptop. Laptop internal storage is also at a premium. So what do we do? We do what everyone else does: we push files to external drives. Everything from Seagate Desktop monster enclosures, to more portable 2.5” GoFlex drives, to even (in a pinch) ‘thumb’ drives.
All these workarounds come with their own unique problems and it is for this reason that an entirely different form-factor external storage solution can always be found in our camera bag – usually right next to our card readers. The storage device we are alluding to is none other than the Lexar Portable SSD.
This portable device has the exact same form-factor as any of the Workflow card readers we rely upon, and is really meant to be used in conjunction with the Workflow Hub. However the Workflow Hub is not all that portable and usually we simply throw the proper card reader(s) and the Portable SSD into our bag and call it good enough.
With sizes ranging from a decent 256GB to better 512GB the Workflow Portable SSD is more than spacious enough for a photoshoot and yet offers speeds that can keep up with cutting edge cards such as those XQD 2900X series. Equally important with prices ranging from $130 to $170 this model is not all that expensive when compared to other equally fast external storage solutions.
In other words, it is big enough and fast enough to not handicap our work flow, yet is reasonably priced enough to be considered a necessity and not a ‘luxury’. Today we will be putting the smaller 256GB version under the microscope to show exactly what this model can and cannot offer consumers.
