Portable storage devices (PSDs) are small hard drives designed to copy digital photographs from your camera. It will allow you to copy RAW data from your camera. This is slightly different from a portable media players, which stores music and movies.

When travelling and photographing for weeks at a time you may often need to backup or purge your digital memory cards. If you don't want to carry the expense and weight of a laptop then a personal storage device may be a useful alternative.

Many PSDs will connect directly to a camera and copy the images, or they may provide a slot for a memory card to plugin, with or without a card reader device. Some early models allow you to review the images on colour screens, but at the top end of the market are the portable media players which are designed for MP3s and movies as well.

See also

• Mass Storage Digital Camera (MSDC)

Computer storage media