What a handy little device the Vosonic X Drive is!
It’s a portable storage device capable of reading many different types of media cards. It houses any 2.5″ IDE disk drive (9mm) and connects to your PC via USB2. The device runs on a proprietary lithium ion battery and yields ~3.5 hours continuous use. The box includes power adapter, power lead, mini CD and manual.
I bought it as a viable alternative to compact flash cards. My Canon EOS20D eats cards at the rate of 1Gb per 80 RAW shots. My intention is to use it when out and about as a memory brick (not flash memory stick) and to back up images from compact flash cards.
The device came without a hard drive at a cost of ~£50 via ebay. I already had an old 20Gb laptop drive and fitting it was easy. The plug’n'play nature of the device means that it doesn’t need any OEM specific drivers, which is great when moving from PC to PC.
The X Drive is marketed as a USB2 device, although it doesn”t transfer data anywhere near USB2 speed. – X Drive to PC is ~4.8Mb/s and card to X Drive is ~1Mb/s.
Is this problem? it depends if you are in a hurry! I’m not, I just want cheap portable storage.
I have tested this with compact flash, snart media, memory sticks and XD cards and they all work without any problems. In fact, I had a corrupt XD card, which couldn’t be read in the camera, but the X Drive managed to retrieve all bar one file.
I would definitely recommend this. It’s an extremely cheap option for off-line storage and also doubles as an MP3 player!
