needing an at-home sharing and on-the-road solution

[GKent]

My wife and I want to both access our photos with IMatch 5. Two months of the year, we are on the road traveling together and would like to have our photos with us to continue or work. What hardware solutions are there for us?

It seemed to me that ideally I would get a SSD USB 3/NAS drive and share it over a network at home and use it via a USB connection while on the road. (Road use would have to be one at a time, which presents problems. If there were a travel way to share a drive that would be better.)

But it doesn't seem that a SSD USB3/NAS drive exists.

I need a simple reliable solution.

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance for the help.

GKent

[Carlo Didier]

Hello and welcome!
For your home, you could probably get an empty NAS box and put SSD disks in it instead of HDDs. You may need connector adapters though. And the speed of SSDs may be lost in the network connection, so cheaper HDDs might be just as good.

You could also use the same NAS box when traveling, unless the space and weight are a problem. You'd need to have at least a small ethernet switch to connect the laptops and NAS together.

Another possibility for travel use are Wifi enabled external disks. I know they exist, but I don't know about their limitations (speed, number of simultaneous connections, ...)

[lnh]

There are many USB3 2.5" drive enclosures in the market at a relatively low price. Search Amazon or Newegg and you'll see so many choices the difficulty is picking one. Any of them could use a SSD rather than a HDD. For more money you can add capabilities like built-in WiFi sharing. For example Macally has one with WiFi/USB3/Ethernet/built-in battery (http://www.macally.com/EN/?page_id=12507). The existing product used the ugly wide kludge USB 3.0 connector and I'd expect a new version to spin with the reversible USB 3.1 at some point now that USB 3.1 is finding its way into products. Small NAS boxes using 2 x 2.5" drives also exist which might be an option, but then you also end up with another computer you have to manage/update/etc.

[Aubrey]

I use a 2Tb Western Digital disk when travelling nd place all images on it. This is USB3 and is relatively fast. I synch this with my main hard drive using Allwaysync.

I use pack and go ( Imatch) to sync the database. Use same username on laptop as main machine.

I do not synch my cache.

Aubrey