Portable Storage Review - 3 Cheers for UPS

[cowman345]

Got my VP300 X's Drive Pro today, let me tell you, what an improvement over the X's Drive II.

First of all, UPS delivered this in ONE DAY. I was shocked. Shipped Monday, arrived Tuesday. Wow.

Drive is built like a tank, I jogged at a fast pace around my building while copying a full 128MB Compact Flash Card. The whole time the drive was bouncing roughly up and down in my pocket. The card transferred repeately in 3-4 minutes every time I tried it. I couldn't believe it.

Haven't tested the mp3 feature yet, but one feature that I'm finding indespensible is the fact that you can examine the contents of folders (or delete folders, even) to make sure a card copy was successful if it powers down before you check it.

At $229 with a 20gig drive, I have more space than I'll ever need, plus a portable mp3 player (comes with earbuds, even) all for about a hundred more than I spend on the X's Drive II with a 6gig crappy drive.

-dave-

[CyberDyneSystems]

Cowman,..

Do you have a link to the New version X's drive?
I haven't seen this one yet.

Thanks :)

[CyberDyneSystems]

Oops,. I found it.. Very cool!

http://www.xs-drive.com/xsdrivepro/

[Zap37]

Where did you get it for that price?

[oldlincoln]

You can get one here:
http://www.mydigitaldiscount.com/default.php?cPath=74_151
These guys are reliable. They have good prices on CF cards and BP-511 batteries too.

[Sketcher]

Hmmmm.... another gadget to stalk.... and it does mp3's.

There might be a 30GB Xs II showin' up for a good price in the Marketplace forum pretty soon!

[defordphoto]

Sketcher wrote:
Hmmmm.... another gadget to stalk.... and it does mp3's.

There might be a 30GB Xs II showin' up for a good price in the Marketplace forum pretty soon!



Email me personally if you do. I could care less if it does mp3's and would definitely be interested in your Xs Drive II.

[David Wild]

cowman345 wrote:
[snip]

At $229 with a 20gig drive, I have more space than I'll ever need, plus a portable mp3 player (comes with earbuds, even) all for about a hundred more than I spend on the X's Drive II with a 6gig crappy drive.

-dave-

You will **never** have more space than you need. The amount you need is twice what you have now, plus 10gig - and this remains true when the new drive arrives.

[defordphoto]

cowman345 wrote:
At $229 with a 20gig drive, I have more space than I'll ever need...

Famous last words.

I remember the C=64 I had. "We'll never use all of that 64K." And then I remmeber when we figured out how to flip over floppies. "360K? We'll never use all that."

And I remember my 100 megabyte drive on my Amiga that cost $650. "This is enough drive space for all my software."

And I was running a BBS and snagged a super, awesome deal on a full-height 1 gig drive for $1,000.

Now on three computers I have 3/4 of a terrabyte running to store all my stuff.

20 terrabytes I am sure will never be enough space.

[Belmondo]

I'm thinking of when Canon brings out an affordable 10mp camera. The TIFF files will be 30mb (or multiples of that if saved as PS files). My 300G storage will disappear pretty quicly.

I stll remember my 128K Mac with a single 400k floppy drive. You could get the Mac OS (1.0), MacDraw, MacPaint, and MacWrite, plus a few files, on a single floppy. Man, we were cookin' then!

Tom

[openspace]

Ypu can get a 20GB X's-Drive Pro for $229.99 US at http://www.mydigitaldiscount.com.

They make versions through 80GB ($359.99)

[cowman345]

Allow me to rephrase:

20gigs is all I'll ever need for my 10D on a 5 day vacation taking photos 8-10 hours a day. :)

BTW, I can't find these anywhere but mydigitaldiscount.com... wonder why??

-dave-

p.s. mp3 playback is questionable, but this may be the inferior earbuds included. but who cares, i could drop this thing from 4 ft during a copy without an error (but i'm not gonna try).

[mjordan]

RFMSports wrote:

Famous last words.

I remember the C=64 I had. "We'll never use all of that 64K." And then I remmeber when we figured out how to flip over floppies. "360K? We'll never use all that."

And I remember my 100 megabyte drive on my Amiga that cost $650. "This is enough drive space for all my software."

And I was running a BBS and snagged a super, awesome deal on a full-height 1 gig drive for $1,000.

Now on three computers I have 3/4 of a terrabyte running to store all my stuff.

20 terrabytes I am sure will never be enough space.

I started out with a Apple II+ with 48K and a cassett back in 1979. I now have 700 gigs on one computer and need to get a hot swappable 4 bay Firewire case to add.

I think the cheap hard drive space has made us lazy, just like cheap ram made Microsoft lazy with their programming. They don't need to program nice effecent tight coding anymore, the consumers have lots of ram to use. And we don't have to archive off old stuff and the 4th duplicate of the last 1500 raw files... just buy another 300 gig hard drive. LOL!

I ran a BBS for over 10 years, Jim. I was up to 9 modem lines, 40 gigs of disc space over 14 computers, 5 individual CD drives and a Pioneer 2x six pack CD drive (which I even still have). Ah, the DOS days and the shoothing sound of over a dozen muffen fans all turning at different speeds and frequencies. LOL!

I have a 40 gig Image Tank G2 that I filled up 20 gig up over 7 days of shooting not too long ago. It worked real well without any problems.

Mike

[cowman345]

Err.... Just got back from New Orleans trip.

The X's Drive Pro served me well and so far, no errors in backing stuff up. Two nits though:

One, sometimes the unit freezes during initialization and must be reset.

Two, the unit, for some reason or other DOES NOT POWER DOWN manually. This is just stupid. It broke one night into my vacation and every time I use it, I have to wait the minute or two for it to power down automatically (but thank goodness it does that much!)

Time to send it in for repair or something.... bummer.

-dave-

[robertwgross]

I have the oldest X drive version 1.

It works just the opposite. Once it has finished a copy job, it will power itself down within 15 seconds or so to save battery.

---Bob Gross---

[Chad Frog]

X Drive sounds nice but for those of you who love music almost as much as photography I highly suggest the iPod.

Apple recently released an upgrade to the iPod software that, with a $100 media card reader from Belkin, allows you to store your images on the iPod's HD and transfer them to the computer later. I love it when manufacturers add features after a product has been released!

In my case, I already had the iPod and I already had the camera, so for $100 it was a no brainer. I do submit to the argument that the Apple hardware is expensive but damn, if Mr. Jobs doesn't know the meaning of convergence.

[pradeep1]

I think you could buy the cheapest model and switch out to a larger drive when the prices drop on 2.5" drives, maybe?

Currently, at the rate I am taking photos, I will need approximately 60 GB carrying capacity to cover an average month long trip somewhere. I am shooting superfine JPGs. Can only imagine how much I'll need if I am shooting RAW...maybe 120GB?

[digitaltourist]

I have heard reports of absolutely abysmal performance and that it kills the battery after transfering a 256M card. Seems like a very expensive gadget that is great for MP3's and not quite up to the task as a portable storage device.


X Drive sounds nice but for those of you who love music almost as much as photography I highly suggest the iPod.

Apple recently released an upgrade to the iPod software that, with a $100 media card reader from Belkin, allows you to store your images on the iPod's HD and transfer them to the computer later. I love it when manufacturers add features after a product has been released!

In my case, I already had the iPod and I already had the camera, so for $100 it was a no brainer. I do submit to the argument that the Apple hardware is expensive but damn, if Mr. Jobs doesn't know the meaning of convergence.

[Chad Frog]

I have heard reports of absolutely abysmal performance and that it kills the battery after transfering a 256M card. Seems like a very expensive gadget that is great for MP3's and not quite up to the task as a portable storage device.


X Drive sounds nice but for those of you who love music almost as much as photography I highly suggest the iPod.

Apple recently released an upgrade to the iPod software that, with a $100 media card reader from Belkin, allows you to store your images on the iPod's HD and transfer them to the computer later. I love it when manufacturers add features after a product has been released!

In my case, I already had the iPod and I already had the camera, so for $100 it was a no brainer. I do submit to the argument that the Apple hardware is expensive but damn, if Mr. Jobs doesn't know the meaning of convergence.


Performance is not "fast" but I haven't noticed that it killed my battery like some claim. Overall an excellent way to go if you enjoy music and photography. I have to say that I am biased torwards the iPod due to it's integration with iTunes but if you want something a bit more quick and dirty I'm sure X Drive is a fine product. Regardless of how you do it, kicking the laptop to the curb on a vacation or photo shoot is a worthy goal.

[Bubber Jones]

I started out with a Apple II+ with 48K and a cassett back in 1979. I now have 700 gigs on one computer and need to get a hot swappable 4 bay Firewire case to add.

I think the cheap hard drive space has made us lazy, just like cheap ram made Microsoft lazy with their programming. They don't need to program nice effecent tight coding anymore, the consumers have lots of ram to use. And we don't have to archive off old stuff and the 4th duplicate of the last 1500 raw files... just buy another 300 gig hard drive. LOL!

I ran a BBS for over 10 years, Jim. I was up to 9 modem lines, 40 gigs of disc space over 14 computers, 5 individual CD drives and a Pioneer 2x six pack CD drive (which I even still have). Ah, the DOS days and the shoothing sound of over a dozen muffen fans all turning at different speeds and frequencies. LOL!

I have a 40 gig Image Tank G2 that I filled up 20 gig up over 7 days of shooting not too long ago. It worked real well without any problems.

Mike

Well 'enough disk space' is a relative term. I've got my main storage server with ~ 1TB storage and the other 19 computers have ~4TB combined. None of my machines have less than 60GB storage... Do I need all of this? Maybe, but probably not. It lets me be very slack on cleaning up my pron ^h^h^h^h crud... There's simply too much stuff and not enough time to filter through it. Besides, there's been more than one time when I was happy to find that one shot that seemed to be a throw away at the time, but turned out to be a once in a lifetime shot....

I never delete anything, just add disks. Keep everything and figure out a good system for storing it.

Go for the big portable devices, you never know when you'll need it...

btw, I ran a BBS for about 4 years too :D

[cowman345]

I have heard reports of absolutely abysmal performance and that it kills the battery after transfering a 256M card. Seems like a very expensive gadget that is great for MP3's and not quite up to the task as a portable storage device.



Erm... this is DEFINATELY NOT a problem for me... in fact, the battery life on this model (X's Drive Pro) far surpasses the X's Drive 2. I dumped about 10-20 memory cards without the power indicator falling below 2/3 full.

-dave-

[bananaman]

What about the VP 6230, seems the best drive available at the minute?
http://www.vosonic.com/index.php?php_mode=spec&php_itemid=36

[pehabe]

i have one of this...

my cons:
- weight ;)
- battery life
- no LOCK for ON button, to avoid the unit switched ON when crampped in bag

my pros:
- folder system
- easy to operate
- MP3 player (not recommended concerning battery life)