The X’S-DRIVE II VP2060 is the latest plastic enclosure waiting to swallow a 2.5in laptop hard drive, helping to keep you fully filed up.
In this age of digital video, digital images, digital music and, most importantly, digital porno, having a portable hard drive can be a convenient way to transport these ever growing files around. The X’S-DRIVE II VP2060 is the latest plastic enclosure waiting to swallow a 2.5in laptop hard drive, helping to keep you fully filed up.
The VP2060 doesn’t ship with a 2.5in drive, which explains its reasonable price of $231. However, AusPC Market (the exclusive distributor of this product) are now selling these units bundled with a variety of laptop drives, ranging from 20GB up to 40GB in size. There is a slight quirk with drives over 20GB in size -- this unit requires that they be formatted using FAT32, and Windows XP automatically ensures that any drives over 20GB in size are NTFS. So you’ll need to find a Win9x boot disk to format your portable drive if it’s over 20GB.
Installing the drive within this enclosure is a breeze. Simply unscrew the base, insert the hard drive, and you’re ready to rock. Once your hard drive is installed you can use either USB 1.1 or the substantially faster USB 2.0 connection to transfer files between your PC and the VP2060. If you’re running XP or 2000 there shouldn’t be any need to install drivers to get this product to work -- plug it into your USB port and away you go.
As well as the ability to lug a laptop hard drive around as a portable storage device, the VP2060 also doubles as a card reader. Six different card types can be used in the slots on this device -- SmartMedia, SD/MMC, Memory Stick, MS Pro, CompactFlash I/II and finally IBM Microdrive. The cool thing is that you can transfer files from any of these cards to the hard drive without having to plug the unit into a PC. This will be especially appealing to digital photographers, who can use this device to upload images off full memory cards, so they don’t need to drag a laptop to each shoot. It’s not the quickest at this task, averaging a transfer speed of around 975kb/s, meaning it will take around nine minutes to suck down the contents of a 512MB memory card, but it’s bearable.
The VP2060 is self-powered thanks to an internal, rechargeable, Lithium-Ion battery (1.6 hour lifespan), so you won’t need to carry an external power pack.
While this is a very niche product, for those it’s relevant to (mainly photographers), the convenience of this product makes it a must have device. Now, if it were only a little faster at transferring from the memory cards to the internal hard drive, it’d be perfect. . .
Issue: 137 | June, 2012