Review: Sanho HyperDrive SPACE
The HyperDrive SPACE is a battery-powered USB hard drive with various memory card slots. As a photographer, I use it to copy images from the CompactFlash card in my camera, allowing me to empty the card and use it again. When I am finished, I can plug the drive into the USB port of my computer, from which I can view, edit, and back up the images.
This is not the first device like this that I have owned. About a year and a half ago, I bought a Nikon Coolwalker (see my Coolwalker review). I had issues with it being slow and having poor battery life, problems which became intolerable when I decided to shoot exclusively in RAW. I went looking for a replacement, and I chose the HyperDrive SPACE because it had the best published specs in terms of transfer rate and battery life.
The HyperDrive SPACE does not have a color LCD display, and it does not attempt to display images. I had stopped doing that with the Coolwalker, partly because of battery life, but also because the display is small and now because the Nikon product doesn't have support for the Canon RAW files produced by my camera.
Testing
I wasn't about to rely on this new device during a photo shoot until I had tested it. I wanted to know if the speed and battery life were really going to be there.
For my testing, I used a pair of Kingston 4GB Ultimate cards, which are rated at 133x or 20 MB/s. They claim, in fact, to have a read transfer rate of 23 MB/s. I threw in a 40 GB hard drive I had laying around, a Toshiba MK4026GAX, which has a 16 MB cache and a 5400 RPM rotational speed.
NOTE: I am still testing. I just received the drive today (March 7, 2007).
The Toshiba MK4026GAX claims to draw 2.5 watts for reading/writing and 2.9 watts for seeking. I wonder if I can find a drive that uses less power, thereby extending the battery life. I think I would need a read/write power consumption of 1.75 watts. The Hitachi/TravelStar 5K160 comes close, 1.8 watts ($130). The Seagate 5400.3 is also 1.8 watts writing ($170).
Test Results
Transfer Rate: The claim is that it can transfer 1 GB of data in less than a minute, sustaining a 20 MB/s transfer rate. My tests yield about half of that, just over 10 MB/s with verification turned off. The limiting factor may be my card or perhaps the drive I am using. This is still much better than I was getting with the Coolwalker.
Battery Life: With a full charge, I was able to copy about 70 GB. This is less than the 100 GB claim of the manufacturer, but the difference is clearly caused by the reduced transfer rate. If the 20 MB/s transfer rate could be achieved, then I would probably be able to store 140 GB.
Capacity: This was sort of a non-issue for me, because I bought the unit without a hard drive and installed my own. They offer the unit with 40, 80, 120, and 160 GB drives, 160 being the largest 2.5" hard drive made today. The photography sources I use do not seem interested in selling the units without drives, and none of them have the 160 GB version listed, so 120 GB is the current upper-end. I figure that by the time I am ready to put a larger drive in the thing, drives in the neighborhood of 200 or 320 GB should be available.
Conclusion
So far, I am happy with the investment. While I haven't achieved the performance that was claimed by the manufacturer, it is a vast improvement over the Nikon Coolwalker, and therefore I am happy.