Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310
Review Date: 18th January 2005
Introduction
The Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 is both a portable storage device and MP3 music player, featuring a 2.5-inch 20Gb Toshiba laptop hard disk drive and several memory card slots which support 8 different types of memory cards. The Vosonic VP3310 is simple to use - just insert your memory card and press the large Copy button to copy its contents onto the device. You are then free to format your memory card and carry on shooting. The Vosonic VP3310 has a blue backlit monochrome LCD display that enables you to see a list of the files that are stored on it - there is no actual viewing of the images themselves, which helps to keep the price below £200. As the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 is basically a hard-drive in a stylish metal and plastic case, any type of file that you would normally find on a computer can be stored on it. Although memory card prices are falling quickly, a device like the Vosonic VP3310 still offers a cheap and convenient way to store 1,000s of photos. 18 months ago I reviewed the original Vosonic X'S-Drive, which I still use today, and last week I took a favourable look at the smaller Vosonic IC Drive VP3610. So does the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 offer anything extra to those models? Read my review to find out.
Price
The Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 has a recommended retail price of £189.99 for the 20Gb version that I reviewed.
There are also 40Gb, 60Gb and 80Gb versions available, plus a barebones unit without any hard-drive fitted costing £118.40 (which allows you to source your own 2.5 inch hard-drive).
There is no limit on the hard-drive capacity that the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 supports, so in theory you could keep upgrading the unit with larger hard-drives to accomodate larger file sizes in the future. The Vosonic IC Drive VP3610 does not allow you to do this.
Features
The Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 supports 8 different kinds of memory card; Compact Flash Type 1/II (CF), Smart Media (SM), Memory Stick (MS), Memory Stick Pro (Blue version), Secure Digital (SD), XD Picture Card (XD), MultiMedia Card (MMC) and IBM MicroDrive, which fit into one of the three card slots on the side of the unit. This is two more memory card formats than the original XS-Drive. The Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 is available in either a white or black version (the black model that I reviewed looks more stylish in my opinion).
The achilles heel of the X'S Drive that I own is its USB 1.1 interface which the drive uses to connect to your PC. This is one of the most significant upgrades in subsequent Vosonic drives, including the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310, which uses the faster USB 2.0 interface. This allows for much quicker file transfers to your PC. When it is plugged into your PC the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 also doubles up as a multi-card reader/writer, so you can save yourself some money by not having to buy a card reader as well.
The Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 is powered by a rechargeable 3.6V Li-ion battery which has a lifespan of around 2 hours. Alternatively you can use the supplied 50/60Hz 100-240V AC adapter to plug the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 into the mains power in most countries; this is also the way in which the battery is recharged (you can't remove the battery from the unit).
The Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 is advertised as being an MP3 player as well as a portable storage device, but this isn't really one of its strong points. You can play, pause and stop individual tracks and choose a particular folder of tracks to play and repeat tracks, but unbelievably there are no fast forward or rewind functions. The supplied headphones are quite stylish in a silver plastic kind of way. On the top of the unit are two buttons, one marked -, the other +, which control the volume. The headphone socket is located under quite a flimsy plastic flap on the top of the unit - the USB port is also located here.
On the front of the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 are 8 buttons: power, plus, minus, stop/esc, enter, down, up and copy. There is also a 2 inch monochrome LCD screen which allows you to control the drive and see what is stored on it. The screen is back-lit with a bright blue light, making it comfortable to use in low-light situations.
The Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 has a small recess marked Reset on the top of the unit which allows you to reset the device. It weighs 350 grams including the hard-drive and battery, and its dimensions are 135 (L) x 85 (W) x 34 (H) mm.
The following items are supplied with the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310: User Manual, Setup CD, USB Cable, AC/DC Adapter, Carrying Case and a pair of Earphones.
Design
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Front / 2 Inch LCD Screen / 8 Buttons |
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Back |
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Card Slots |
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Top / DC Power Socket / Headphone Socket & USB Port (under plastic flap) / Reset Button |
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Front / Power On |
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Front / Power On / LCD Screen Backlit |
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Front |
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Compared to the Vosonic IC Drive VP 3610 |
Ease of Use
At heart the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 is very similar to the original X'S Drive that I own and the Vosonic IC Drive VP3610 that I reviewed last week, in that it has a relatively small list of features which in turn means that it is pretty straightforward to operate.
It's easy to copy your photos onto the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310. Simply insert the memory card into the correct slot and press the large Copy button on the front of the device. The LCD screen lights up and displays which folder the files are being copied into, how many files have been copied, the percentage of the current file that has been copied and a small flashing arrow symbol to indicate that a transfer is taking place. It took 11 minutes 55 seconds to copy the contents of a full 512Mb 24x speed PQI compact flash card (87 Canon EOS 10D RAW files, 489Mb total data). This gives a transfer rate of 0.68Mb/Sec (489Mb transferred in 715 secs).
The transfer of the files from the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 onto your PC is equally as straight-forward. Plug one end of the supplied USB cable into a USB 2.0 port on your computer and the other into the mini-USB port on the top of the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310, turn the device on, which creates 4 new drives in Windows Explorer (one for the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310's internal hard-drive and one for each of the 3 memory card slots). You can insert your memory card and use the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 as a card reader, or you can copy and paste the contents of the memory card onto your PC. If you know how to use Windows Explorer, then you know how to access what is stored on the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310. The USB 2.0 connection means that the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 is a lot quicker to transfer files onto your PC than the X'S Drive - 2 minutes as opposed to 5 minutes for 488Mb data, which is quite a time saving, especially if you have been away for a period of time and filled up the 20Gb hard-drive.
The Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 partly solves one of the main drawbacks of the original X'S Drive, which is the inability to see and check your files once they have been copied onto the device. The addition of the 2 inch LCD screen allows you to check what is stored on the device, and you can therefore verify if a transfer has been successful or not before you format your memory card (if you have sufficient time that is!). Copying files onto the original X'S Drive is a bit of a blind leap of faith, as there is no way to check if a transfer has been successful (although 99% of the time they are).
As with the Vosonic IC Drive VP3610, the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310's user interface, however, isn't the most intuitive in the world, which is why it is only a partial solution. The main annoyance is that only the name and details of one particular file are displayed onscreen; to scroll though the files, you have to press the up or down button, which refeshes the display with the name and details of the next file. You can hold down the up or down buttons to scroll more quickly, but even so it can take a while to look through the contents of a folder to check that all the files are present and correct. It doesn't help that the display flickers as you do so! You do get used to it after a short period of using it though. I did prefer the button layout and markings of the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 to the X-shaped layout of the Vosonic IC Drive VP3610.
The Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 has improved on a couple of other things that annoyed me about the original X'S Drive. Firstly, the noise of the unit has been significantly reduced, so although not whisper quiet, it is now barely discernible. Secondly, the biggest design flaw of the X'S Drive is the Power and Copy buttons, which are slightly raised above the level of the rest of the device, leading to the unit inadvertently turning itself on. Vosonic have addressed this by having to press the Power and Copy buttons at the same time to turn the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 on.
Conclusion
(out of 5
stars)
The Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 is a definite improvement over the original X'S Drive that I own. It's faster, more stylish, has added (although limited) MP3 playback capability, a backlit LCD screen that allows you to check what is stored on the device and is just as easy to use. At £200, it has the added advantage of not having a lot of competition - perhaps its main competitor is another Vosonic model, the IC Drive VP3610, which for only £10 more offers the same hard-drive capacity in a smaller and lighter body (because it uses a smaller 1.8 inch laptop hard-drive). The IC Drive does have a much-reduced battery time, just over 1 hour versus the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310's 2 hours, doesn't have the backlit screen and you can't upgrade the internal hard-drive, so you will need to weigh up the pros and cons of each model before deciding. The 12 minute transfer time from a full 512Mb memory card to the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 isn't exactly quick, which means that you should buy a few memory cards that you can use whilst the one in the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 is copying files across. Having said that, the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310 is still a lot more economical than buying the equivalent memory cards (despite the recent fall in memory prices). If you are in the market for a portable storage device then you could do a lot worse than the Vosonic X'S Drive Pro VP3310. As for me, I'm still going to stick with the original, reliable X'S Drive for the time being.