X'S Drive II Copy Reliablity

[FlyingPete]

I have one of the above drives I use as a portable store. As I am data paranoid, I always copy my cards twice before reusing them.

Is this necessary? I have never had any issues with data up till now. What I am mainly concerned about is the visible lack of a verify operation. If I can verify that the drive verifies :) all the data copied to it, it would male me much happier, take less time to download cards, and save battery life on the drive.

Any ideas?

[Jon]

. . . and how can you be sure that the second copy operation is going to be the good one? Does it let you choose where to put the files? It'd be a real shame to copy the files over and wipe a good copy with a bad one because of a failure.

[RichardtheSane]

Each copy operation writes to it's own folder.

I have had faliures with one of these, maybe had I copied it twise then it would have worked the second time. Either way I could not trust it and sold it shortly after, and replaced it with more CF cards.

[tommykjensen]

I can't decide if I should by a portable device like this when I go on a 3 week vacation next year. I know I will take a lot of photos so I could use 20 GB or more. On the other hand the harddisk is more fragile than the CF cards so I will probably end up buying a couple more 2 GB cards. I just found a killer price (for Denmark) for the Kingtston Elite Pro 2 GB so I might just buy one or 2 of that. The price droped from $229 to $196. As a comparison the Sandisk Ultra II cost $303.

[FlyingPete]

I can't decide if I should by a portable device like this when I go on a 3 week vacation next year. I know I will take a lot of photos so I could use 20 GB or more. On the other hand the harddisk is more fragile than the CF cards so I will probably end up buying a couple more 2 GB cards. I just found a killer price (for Denmark) for the Kingtston Elite Pro 2 GB so I might just buy one or 2 of that. The price droped from $229 to $196. As a comparison the Sandisk Ultra II cost $303.

The concept of these drives is very good, obviously they are fragile, so can't be thrown around in the way CF cards do.

I find it great, although a little slow if I a shooting heavily in RAW, it is heaps cheaper than the equivient in flash cards, however at todays prices I might have considered a pile of flash cards, as I have never shot the 40GB of the drive capacity!

My last vacation of a week, I took 2GB worth on my G3 as JPG's (I had a 512MB & 128MB card), alot of them were not keepers, but there is no way to go through them once they are on the drive until you find a PC. Todays prices would mean that I would have been better off with 2GB of flash cards!


I have had faliures with one of these, maybe had I copied it twise then it would have worked the second time. Either way I could not trust it and sold it shortly after, and replaced it with more CF cards.

...and that folks is what worries me!

The other thing is what happens if there is a drive failure of it is lost. In the old days of film (you know that funny stuff in the little metal cans) I uses to distribute the rolls of film throughout our luggage in case on went missing, I didn’t loose the lot (statistically speaking I was increasing the chance of a loss!).

If I was using CF cards, I could distribute those, and hey when was the last time you saw one fail catastrophically (i.e. can get no data off it)?

[robertwgross]

The concept of these drives is very good, obviously they are fragile, so can't be thrown around in the way CF cards do.


I have one of the old original X-drives. I had been shooting all day in a remote national park, and I returned to my car. I took the X-drive out of the car trunk and set it on the car roof. Then I started pulling the CF cards out of my camera pouch to copy them. When CF card number 1 was in the drive, and the copy light was going, a gust of wind blew the entire drive from the car roof to the parking lot surface, which was gravel.

It kept running through the whole event, finished the card, and never missed a byte.

---Bob Gross---

[Scottes]

If I'm out shooting and fill a card I just pop it into the X-Drive, hit copy and put the X-Drive back into my pocket and forget about it. Other times I'll copy a card when I get back to the car - pop in the CF and start the copy and drive off and ignore it.

I haven't had a problem yet.

But I *do* wish that it had a "verify last copy" or something like that. It would be nice.