There are still many newbies to digital photography out there who are not familiar with such storage devices. That's perhaps why the first thing they think about is to always get more cards. (See below for other reasons.) Otherwise, they shoot at lower resolution. That's a shame.
$250 is only the casing. With the HDD, it will cost >$350. For that price, the layman would prefer to get an nifty MP3 player or PDA.
The Compact Drive is also big and heavy, relative to those cute digicams that the layman loves. I've asked around and generally, these people just cringe at the idea of having to carry this 'giant' when their Ixuses, Coolpixes, etc weigh so much less and are much smaller.
Above all, the Compact Drive should be useful only if you do a lot of travelling or will be away from the computer for some time whereby you can't download your images conveniently. If you are just shooting locally in singpore, I don't think you'll ordinarily ever utilize close to even 2 or 3 GB in a day. A newbie will probably shoot on average 512MB or less. Then the Compact Drive is pretty much an overkill. It'll probably be a white elephant.
BUT... If, as I've mentioned, you do frequent travelling and you demand the highest image quality, you definitely can't do without a device like the Compact Drive. If that's your style of shooting, I'd say a Compact Drive is sooo much more worth it than getting several memory cards.
HDD crashes is not a problem to be paranoid about. If it happens, then just one word to describe it: "SWAY"! (Bad luck!) Think about it, anything else could happen too. Your digital cam might fail, your films might get lost, your luggage stolen, etc.
As for careful handling, that's not a problem either. Everything requires careful handling. Even your camera needs careful handling! Using batteries... Well of course, your digicams, PDAs, MP3 players and other electronic devices need batteries too! Just charge them when needed.
Thus, I suspect that's why there is still no well known brands yet in such digital storage devices. So far they are made in Singapore, or assembled in Taiwan or China. With the exception that Nikon has got one released recently. When digital photography reaches more exciting levels, with 5 MP being the common and minimum resolution in compact digital cams, and 15-20 MP is the norm in DSLRs, I should think the bigger names like Sony, Panasonic, Canon or maybe even Creative will start going into producing such devices? Hmmm, maybe another 6-8 years' time at least?
