Are there any small portable batteries backups I can use for an external hard drives?

[Noam Osband]

I am about to go do some filming on the road. While traveling, I want to be able to edit some footage I have on these external hard drives. I usually only use these externals when they are plugged into a backup battery so that I dont need to worry about the power cutting out and the externals shutting off. I use the APC Back-UPS which is great but I'm wondering, however, if there are any small, more portable battery backups I could purchase. My APC backup is big and kind of bulky, and i don't need eight inputs. I just need 2-3 for the externals I'll be running.

So.....quickly put.....are there any super small portable battery backup options I can carry around with me or are they all routinely over ten pounds?

[Trevor Dennis]

Not entirely sure I am understanding all you are saying, but the small pocket drives powered from the USB port might be useable. In the interests of a complete reply, I just checked a couple of pocket drives with Crystal Disk Mark. The USB2 drive uses two USB connections - one for power and the other for data. The USB3 drive only uses one connection. Neither drive is going to feed your NLE with 1080 footage fast enough. I am not sure if the third file uploaded, but that is for a WD USB3 My Book external with its own PSU. That's much faster.

Just checked the preview, and the last file does not appear to have u[loaded, so I'll it in another post.

[Trevor Dennis]

Sorry, DVInfo won't play nicely. Figures for the WD drive are

110 - 106
37 -59
.460 - .938
.644 - .961

[Petter Flink]

Originally Posted by Noam Osband

I am about to go do some filming on the road. While traveling, I want to be able to edit some footage I have on these external hard drives. I usually only use these externals when they are plugged into a backup battery so that I dont need to worry about the power cutting out and the externals shutting off. I use the APC Back-UPS which is great but I'm wondering, however, if there are any small, more portable battery backups I could purchase. My APC backup is big and kind of bulky, and i don't need eight inputs. I just need 2-3 for the externals I'll be running.

So.....quickly put.....are there any super small portable battery backup options I can carry around with me or are they all routinely over ten pounds?

These are external 3.5" drives in a raid enclosure using 115 V right?

If you really need speed and mobility, there is two paths I would go.
Either a small 2.5" raid solution with firewire 800.
Or a thunderbolt driven single SSD drive.
Both these have enough bus power to drive the raid/SSD without an external power source.

In case you dont have a FW800/Thunderbolt port, use USB3 raid chassie that use a 12V feed and run it on a large Li-ion external battery pack with 12V output.

These solutions will make it easier, lighter and without the risks that 115V/230V come with.

[Noam Osband]

They are not in a raid enclosure. They are just two, standalone 2TB g-tech hard drives.

I guess this means I'm out of options?

[Petter Flink]

Do the G drives have a 115/230 AC direct input or are rhey fed via an external 12v DC power supply?
If they use DC you could use a battery pack directly without going via inversion through a UPS.