X-Drive Image Tank

© zero

 

This is my first review of anything – I have always enjoyed reading them, but never thought of writing one – since this is my first, I am hoping to get some feedback (both good and critical please) because I really hope I can write more in the future.

 

I just received my image tank from an ebay seller - same auction as THIS … it arrived at my house (US to US) 3 says after I made the payment – I put a 12GB laptop hard drive I had in it and had it running in all of 2 minutes

I'm pretty picky about stuff like this, and I have very rarely taken the chance and bought any of the "hidden electronics" as I call them – you know, stuff that isn't advertised in any way and seems too good to be true (almost always from China or somewhere in Asia) – The kind of equipment that makes you say “why don't they have that for sale everywhere? Must be something really fishy about it” … so I went into this with a LOT of scepticism and was prepared to be unimpressed – totally unemotional and ready to put it in the icky equipment box with no hard feelings

 

I am a little shocked to say that I am VERY impressed with this, in my opinion, everyone needs one of these and for the price, you can set up one of these with a brand new 40GB laptop drive from ebay for less than $110 (a lot cheaper with a smaller or used drive) – much cheaper than buying an additional memory card, at least 10x the storage and this has lots of additional functionality

First of all, this arrived at my door exactly 3 days from the day I made the payment, which is pretty unusual for ebay, I liked it so far ... it comes in a decent box that is well protected and was in perfect shape – again, happy

 

The box included:
1. The X-Drive
2. A USB cable
3. The AC adapter
4. A cheesy carrying pouch that I will never use - very thin fabric and no padding at all
5. A small bag with a tiny Phillips screwdriver and 5 small screws
6. The instruction manual – it is even in English! – And well written English at that

 

I didn’t read through the manual before I opened it up and checked it out – nothing at all interesting in here, just the hard mounted IDE connection

The hard drive (in my case, a 12GB Toughbook laptop drive I had laying around) was installed in about 4.7 seconds, although I didn’t time it to be honest – there are no tools required to put it in, it just slides into the IDE bus firmly and that’s it – the only tool you will need is a small Phillips screwdriver, which is included, and that is only to install the cover back on the X-Drive after the hard drive is seated

The cover goes back on with 4 screws, 1 of which I promptly lost – then I realized why there were 5 of them in the bag – nice thinking guys!

 

At that point, I could not resist the urge to just turn it on … much to my surprise, it immediately lit up and was making happy little hard drive noises … the drive I put in there was previously formatted with NTFS, and I know that memory cards use FAT32, so I had to reformat the hard drive – this might be where some of you panic – I have roughly 40 laptops here and work on them as a side job, so I have all kinds of specialized equipment for working and diagnosing all laptop parts, so formatting a hard drive that is not installed in a laptop wouldn’t have been hard to begin with

 

However … just for fun, I plugged in the USB cable and plugged it in to a laptop with XP – it installed itself perfectly and showed up as a hard drive on my system – this was a nice surprise – then it was just a matter of spending the 5 minutes to reformat it to FAT32 with my laptop … all done – nothing else to do whatsoever

It started up flawlessly and worked EXACTLY like it was supposed to – I tried it with a 4GB Microdrive, a SD card and 3 Sony memory sticks (original, pro and the super tiny PRO one) – every one of them slid into the appropriate slots in the device with a nice firm and tight fit – no sloppiness at all, which was one of the things I was worried about and have seen on more than 1 card reader

 

I put in my Microdrive with about 55MB on it to see what it would to … I hit the “copy” button and it does everything by itself, quite fast I might add – completely copies everything from the card onto the hard drive that is installed into the X-Drive – there is no menu, no error message, nothing at all that you can do wrong – there are 2 buttons on this image tank, period. – The power button and the copy button – it’s foolproof

Next, I loaded up a SD card with 500MB’s of pictures on it … it sucked the fun right out of that SD card in all of about 3 minutes – same download speed was attained with a 512MB Sony memory stick that I loaded for a test

It has an internal battery, which I have heard from other Dyxum members lasts about an hour, which is more than enough IMO – it recharges fast – as far as I can tell, it looks fairly easy to replace this battery if it ever goes completely out (providing a replacement can be found), but it can always be powered by the AC adapter and it also draws power and charges itself whenever it is connected to a PC via the USB cable

 

All I have to say is, this thing is amazing - for $42.98 US (including shipping) I can't believe what I got for the money – if I didn’t have my own laptop hard drive, a 40GB drive can be easily won on ebay for around $50 USD

The only complaint I have so far is that it copies the data from the memory cards, but it does not delete them from the memory card, not a huge deal as it’s fast and easy to do a “delete all” or even a format from the camera … also, the soft "case" it came with is junk – but I just used a case from a small point and shoot camera that I had laying around (these can be purchased for next to nothing on ebay) and it works perfect for this – the cables and charger fit nicely in the secondary pocket and the X-Drive itself is a great match for the main camera pocket

I have checked around ebay and found that if you do a lookup for “digital partner” you will find a few variants of this same X-Drive system, it’s obviously all the same inside equipment, just slightly different casings, they all seem to be within $40-$60 US without the hard drive, they all are available with hard drives in several sizes already installed, but it is much more expensive than buying the X-Drive bare and buying your own laptop hard drive from ebay

 

So … for anyone looking for something like this, I would have to highly recommend it – of course you could always go with an Epson 4000, a Compact drive or something similar with a nice picture viewing monitor and MP3 player, which is still very cool, but those run around $500 and up, with some of them closer to the $1000 mark … for my money, this does it all and I wouldn’t use the viewing screen or MP3 player anyways

Hope this helps anyone making up their minds about a memory dump system

 

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Happy shooting !