Can I use a portable hard drive and USB wire as picture storage for my SLR camera instead memory cards?

I have a Digital SLR ( a Nikon D40x). I was looking for a portable hard drive for my laptop and thought of the idea to use it as photo storage as well. I have the wire that would be required to connect the camera to the hard drive. I found a good cheap portable hard drive called the Western Digital Passport 120GB External USB 2.0 Portable Hard Drive. Can anybody tell me if I can do this (and if so how) before i decide to buy the hard drive.

You'll still need memory cards. And just a hard drive won't do it. You need something with an operating system. I know Epson makes viewers, or, if you have an iPod, you can buy an attachment to upload pictures directly to it, which you can later sync with your computer.

Yep, I do this as well, I have a 300gb external drive that I use for storage. You can store all your personal files on it for safe keeping!

Sure you can, no problem. Simply hook the portable hard drive up to your system via a USB port. Then, use another USB port to plug your camera into. Once both are hooked up, open your My Computer or Computer (for Vista) and double click on the drive letter that the portable hard drive is hooked up to, then use your camera software or the Windows photo downloader software to upload the photos in your camera to the hard drive.

Point the camera photos to the path that the portable hard drive is attached to. Or, you can upload the photos to a folder on your laptops hard drive and then drag and drop, copy and paste, or right click and select Send To E:/ (Insert your own drive letter for the drive that the portable hard drive is attached to. Any of these options will send the photos to your portable hard drive for storage.

Then, when you wish to use any software program to edit your photos or print, or share, just open your application, plug in your portable hard drive, and browse from your application to the photos folders on your portable hard drive. Very simple and easy to do.

Also, if you wish to place security via NTFS file system on your portable hard drive be sure to format it in the NTFS format before placing any files on it. You can always convert it later on, but it is simplist to do so at the start.

Hope this helps. It really IS simple. Just start doing it and you will soon find yourself an old hat at it and asnwering others questions on how to do this. At first it seems a bit duanting, but once you take the leap you will see how easy it is and wonder why you ever thought is was difficult.

Have a nice day.

Yes definetly many people and organizations use portable hard drives for photo storage, but there is an interim step you have to do. I think it is more of a question of running the data through your computer's hard drive then transfering it to the portable drive. The software should tell you how to accomplish it.