Review of Hyperdrive Colorspace

For our trips, we needed a way to download and backup our digital memory cards without having to connect to a laptop. While this is an extremely convenient capability in general, this was particularly important in Africa, where we were not taking a laptop and would be on the road for several weeks (we had to limit our luggage and were not going to have access to electricity, other than through the vehicle’s lighter port). After looking at several options, we purchased a Hyperdrive Colorspace with 232GB of storage space. We could not have been happier with the functionality this little device provides.

The Hyperdrive has an extremely simple interface that provides one to three button access to all of the functionality one could want in the field – copying cards, erasing cards, and confirming the quality of the copies. Any of a wide variety of card types plug directly into the unit for access. It is extremely simple to copy cards, and the resulting files appear as a regular directory when connected to the PC. There was enough room on the disk to copy approximately 12,000 pictures in the raw + jpeg format we typically shoot, which is enough for at least 3 weeks on the road. The screen is small, but gives enough of an overview of the shots to do some minimal filtering if desired (we copied pretty much everything and sorted through the images on the computer screen when we got back home).

A couple of things should be pointed out, however. The official specs outlining card copy time and battery usage were not even close to what we saw in the field. That is likely because the manufacturer is promoting the simplest case – copying without verifying the data – whereas we always verify our copies. We found that instead of the advertised four minutes, it took closer to 25 minutes to copy a 4 Gb card, and that we could copy only three cards on a single charge. While the faster copy rate (and associated longer battery life) would have been nice, we felt it was very important to ensure the copy was verified.

The only other issue we had in the field was keeping the unit charged. We didn’t have access to electricity at night, and had to rely on the car charger. When using the car adapter that the unit came with, we found that the system could barely draw enough power to keep up with a copy. In order to manage the number of copies we needed to make, we ended up using the regular 110, plug-in charger and a separate car-to-110 adapter that would allow more power to be drawn. This worked well for our trip, but still required charging the unit several hours per day.

One further, but for us small, issue presented itself when we attempted to locate specific files in the Hyperdrive. Though it is simple enough to find the file if you know where it is, the system does not allow you to rename either the file or the folder to something that means something to you. In our case, this was not a major issue, as we do not use the Hyperdrive as a long-term storage system, and we can rename the files once we upload them to our computer. Nonetheless, finding specific photos did occasionally take a bit of searching.

Overall, given the size, capacity, and usability of the system, we definitely felt we got our money’s worth out of this unit and we highly recommend it.

Terence

www.cityescapesphotography.com