ExpressCard CF reader experiences?

[Cail Young]

Like this:

Anyone used one (not necessarily this one, that was just the first Google hit) ?

Thoughts? After my recent P2 data management tours with a Duel brand ExpressCard->PCMCIA dongle I'm sick of dongles - I want to use a plug in thing like this for my RED CF cards!

 

[Brenton]

We've received footage that was dumped onto a Nexto DI n2525 in the field. that seemed to work pretty well.

http://www.nextodi.co.uk/

 

[Chris Parker]

We've received footage that was dumped onto a Nexto DI n2525 in the field. that seemed to work pretty well.

http://www.nextodi.co.uk/

how many gigs do these things hold? and what are their prices?

 

[Brenton]

how many gigs do these things hold? and what are their prices?

Not sure, I just plugged it in, turned it on and transfered to our storage drives.

From skimming the site, it seems you can put any 2.5" HDD into it. The site says 1gb/min and they had at least 40gb on theres.

Interestingly the DoP was saying that he'd prefer to shoot the CF cards as though they were film and only ever use them once. Personally I think this is a good idea but I also think that a unit like this as a secondary backup on set would also be good practice, especially as at the end of the day all the footage on the CF reader is easily transfered in one go to your post workflow.

B

 

[Stokestack]

These Nexto devices look like an excellent on-location tool (especially since they claim to verify the backup), but I have some quibbles.

1. PATA drive interface; drives have moved to SATA. People are already reporting that they can't find new drives with PATA. From an ArsTechnica forum:

"Both Seagate and Hitachi have recently released new 7200RPM laptop drives with capacities up to 200GB. Neither manufacturer has released a PATA version, and I can find no indication that they plan to."

2. The file system is FAT32, which means a max file size of 4GB. No big deal, I guess, if every take on the Red is a new file.

3. Built-in, non-field-replaceable battery, quoted as being good for only 60GB per charge. There's an external battery option, but that one's only quoted as 80GB capacity. It's beyond me how any vendor failed to learn from the repeated flaps over non-replaceable batteries. Look at the complaints about this with the iPhone, and that's just an everyday consumer product. The decision is especially dumb for a product like this, which is designed to be used in the field for critical archiving in potentially remote locations.

Finally, there's no apparent easy way to swap a new drive in after it fills up. Laptop drives are already pretty cartridge-like; I don't see why you couldn't have a loading slot on the bottom of the device to slide the drive in. This way you could make duplicate archives on set for backup, directly from the "camera original" CF cards. So you'll probably need two of these things at least (which of course serves the vendor's interest).

Oh, and no apparent U.S. distributor. The prices on Amazon UK aren't too bad (under $200); I couldn't find any of the units without a drive preinstalled, however.

 

[Greg M]

Here is the US distributor:
http://www.mydigitaldiscount.com/SP...agate-momentus-drive--8000029F-1189630835.jsp

they sell a varity of versions including w/o drives

 

[Stokestack]

Thanks for that. I guess Nexto didn't list them on their site. And my math was wrong; for some reason I thought the prices were in Euros. Of course they're in pounds, and Amazon UK does in fact have a driveless one listed, at 106 pounds.