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The PSP Giga-pack bundle, the main selling point of which is the 1GB memory card, is the premiere PSP bundle for gamers on the go. However, a 1GB memory card is not the greatest of solutions if one intends to travel with lots of homebrew content, or, more accurately, if one intends to travel with lots of music, movie, or game backup files.

As a child, for long car trips or the occasional airplane ride, I’d regularly travel with my notebook-sized Gameboy tote, which had enough room for the Gameboy, the enormous AC adapter/backup battery, and an assortment of eight or so cartridge games. This setup was pretty efficient at the time, but with the size of cartridges and their respective plastic containers, toting around a too much equipment, which constantly had to be juggled, could get rather annoying.

While games these days tend to come in smaller packages, there’s something to be said about “ripping” one’s games and storing them all on one device, such that one needn’t juggle game discs/cartridges. That’s partially the glory of the PSP homebrew “hack”, since one can backup their games to a memory stick. Unfortunately, with the size of PSP games, even the Giga-pack fails to deliver, as a 1GB memory stick won’t hold more than two games.

A recently advertised solution is the PSP Bank, a hard-drive that can store all of one’s gaming library, music, movies, and other applications. The PSP Bank does this without the need for a computer, such that one can browse files to copy over to the PSP’s memory card from the PSP Bank’s visual interface. The device need only be attached to the PSP while files are copied to or from the PSP.

While the PSP Bank isn’t widely available yet, its sale overseas isn’t discouraging in the Western world, because while the PSP Bank touts features that many PSP gamers may find new, the technology isn’t. Apacer, for example, offers drives with “On the Go” technology, which allows precisely the functionality of the PSP Bank.

While drives like these are solid buys for those who want to keep their PSP files close at hand when traveling, I’ll stick to traveling with my laptop, which lets me swap files with easy, and is always with me when I’m far away from home. For those who don’t have this luxury though, don’t bother waiting for the PSP Bank to hit Western shores, as your nearest computer retailer likely has a similar device already in stock.

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