STEVE PEARCE PHOTOGRAPHY

One immediate requirement after buying a digital camera is for some kind of storage medium.  Most cameras are supplied with a woefully inadequate card, so this is the first item on the agenda.  This article is concerned with what to do during extended periods away from a computer.

Now we’re not talking about trekking through the Andes with weeks away from a power source – you’ll be needing a quaint old invention known as film.  We are talking about normal holidays, maybe in a car, with access to somewhere to re-charge batteries every day or two. In these situations, a couple of options are emerging which allow you to download your data without a computer.

The obvious option is to buy more memory cards or microdrives, but in terms of value, this does not come out very well.  Whilst it is desirable to have two or three cards that will cover a day's shooting and as a back up to each other, you’re going to need a lot of cards to cover two weeks.

A more reasonable option is a portable CD burner with a built in card reader, but this means carrying blank CD’s – heavy and bulky, and relying on the burner, well, to burn properly.

The final option which I decided to go with, uses a laptop computer hard drive with a built in card reader and some circuitry, to allow the copying of files – all in a nice little box.  Now I know this is reliant on hard drive technology, but this is at least as reliable as CD burning and no different to the reliability of a full laptop.  If you want to shoot digital, this is about as good as you are going to do at the moment.

In this card reader/hard drive category of storage are a couple of further variants on the concept – the main difference being with or without an image preview screen.  The screen is a nice feature to have as it means you can check that the image has been copied properly and you can see what you have on the hard drive.  On the flip side of the coin, devices with screens are more power-hungry - your battery will run out more quickly and most importantly, they are more expensive.

Running through this logic, I opted for a hard drive-based system, without an image preview screen, but with basic OK/NOT OK feedback and I bought the maximum capacity I thought I would need.  I took a look around the market and ordered a new Vosonic X-Drive II, with 40GB hard drive, a second battery, a carry case, a 110/240V charger and a car charger from an EBay shop for around 250 Euros.

The Vosonic X-Drive II is available without a hard drive, so if you have an old laptop with a reasonably sized drive, you could also swap that into an X-Drive.  The unit is also sold with various sizes of hard disk. I opted for the 40GB as by my calculations, this can store more than 5000 RAW files from my 10D – enough for several weeks of travel at the volumes I shoot.  With the system being based on standard hard drive technology, there is always the option to change the hard drive if it fails or turns out to be too small in the future.

The X-Drive II is one of the cheapest versions of such a device on the market and as the name suggests is in its second incarnation.  Improvements over the first version consist mainly of an LCD screen (mono and not for file list or image preview) giving basic status and error feedback and a USB2 connection for use when downloading to a PC.

On the front of the box are 4 slots which can accept smartmedia, SD/MMC,

memory stick, compact flash types I and II and IBM microdrives.

In Practice:

The drive comes with a nice carry pouch, which is good for protecting the drive in your camera bag and stopping dust and anything else getting into the card slots.  The unit is a plastic lump and whilst it won’t survive a drowning in rain, it doesn’t feel too flimsy.

I would go so far as to say that the controls of the X-Drive are pretty much foolproof.  There is the on/off button and there is the copy button.  That’s it - no particular room for confusion.  I charged the battery – which actually takes quite a while – I think I ended up leaving it overnight on the first charge to get 3 bars on the battery level indicator, then loaded a CF card into the slot and CF appeared on the screen.  So far so good.  On pressing the copy button, I received an error message.

This is the only problem with the X-Drive type system – at this point, without a PC, there is no-where to go and no way to find out what the problem is.  Having said that, I am not sure that CD based systems or a better LCD screen would give you any more information, and even if you do know what the problem is, if you are in the middle of no-where, there's not much you can do!

I plugged the X-Drive into my PC via the supplied USB cable and it was recognised straight away under windows XP as an external drive.  The slots can then also be used to read from cards and copy directly to your PC.

On checking the drive information, I could see it was not formatted and this was clearly the problem.  To have the option to format the drive in all formats, a small utility is needed from the X-Drive website www.xs-drive.com which is a free download.  I did a quick format and tried the CF card again and all was well.

The feedback from the drive is basic – you see a file copy icon as it copies the files over from cards and it beeps to signal when the process is complete.  There are several potential error messages, all reported by not such obvious icons and you really need the manual to tell what they mean.  I hope not to see these too often, but just in case, I copied the key page of the manual and taped it to the back of the drive:

Each time you copy files to the drive, a new sequentially numbered folder is created on the drive and this ensures that even if you get paranoid, or accidentally copy the same card twice, no data is overwritten.  The X-Drive does not delete the data from the card, but only copies it; when you are satisfied that the data has been copied, you must use your camera to wipe the card clean.  As files cannot be viewed – not even a file list, the process is totally one way.  You add files to the drive and when it’s full, it’s full.  There is no option to delete or modify anything until you can connect to a PC, so make sure you get more capacity than you will need.

To copy a full 256Mb card takes 5-6 minutes.  This is OK, but a 1GB Microdrive takes proportionally 4 times as long, meaning a wait of 20-24 minutes.  This is rather slow and I am not sure whether the bottleneck is the hard drive, the connection/copy process or the card, but means if you are going to shoot hundreds of images a day, you need a couple of microdrives or cards and then download in the evening.

In the future and even now, as 4GB Microdrives are starting to hit the streets, this transfer speed is going to become a problem – a 4GB transfer at this rate taking 80-90 minutes is getting to the edge of a single battery charge.  If your battery is not fresh and full, it could mean needing to be connected to a power source to be sure of completing the transfer.  Having said that, as larger Microdrives become available, the price of 1GB drives will fall, and they will always hold more than 150 RAW images from a 10D.  It may make more sense to buy additional 1GB drives rather than have all your eggs in one 4GB basket anyway.

The speed to copy files over to a PC when connected by USB2 is much better and is about what you would expect from USB2 with any external storage device.

The Lithium-ion battery has a claimed life of 1.5 hours, so you could in theory carry out 4x1GB microdrive transfers – just over 600 10D RAW files on a single charge.  I find this fairly reasonable, but time will tell how the battery holds up.  The second battery I got with the drive is a type for internal connection (the only type the X-Drive accepts) and to fit it means opening the unit up.  Practically speaking, the spare battery is only to replace the first one when it dies after too many re-charge cycles.  It’s unfortunate that normal AA batteries can’t be used in addition to the internal battery, as this would be a good back up when out and about, although it would add to the size and weight.

Conclusion:

The X-Drive II offers no extra features such as MP3 playback as some drives support, but that’s not what I was interested in. I was looking for minimum cost, minimum fuss functionality and data storage volume. The X-Drive is all of that.

A couple of the main shortcomings of the X-Drive II – the inability to view file names to confirm copying and for some MP3 playback, have been addressed in a new release from Vosonic in the form of the X-Drive Pro. This also has a longer claimed battery life of 2 hours. I may well upgrade – the beauty being that I only need a box and can take the hard drive from my X-Drive II.

www.xs-drive.com

Words and images copyright Steve Pearce 2004.