Anyone used Nexto/Nextodi offload enclosure?

B

Barry_Green

Moderator
I heard about the Nexto Ultra from an HVX user in Australia. Seems like an ideal HVX200 offloading companion product; just wondering if anyone has any other experiences to share. I might take the plunge and buy one and do a DVXUser article/review.

Check it out:
http://www.mydigitaldiscount.com/s.nl/it.A/id.1377/.f?sc=2&category=3172

It's a portable battery-powered firewire drive enclosure (hallelujah!) that actually has some decent capacity. They claim you can offload about 40GB of data through the internal battery, and they have a pen-sized external battery that gets you another 70GB. So that's nearly a full 120GB drive's worth of offloading just on battery.

The enclosure is also bus-powered for firewire and USB(!) Finally, one that does both! (only the model ND2525, aka "Nexto Ultra", offers firewire; the others are all USB-only)

And, get this -- it has USB OTG offloading with data verification! That was my big hangup with the other OTG offloaders, was that there was no feedback. This thing has a little LCD display and it also does bit-for-bit verification.

And for those who shoot stills, it has a CompactFlash slot for offloading CF cards.

And it supports large hard drives, so when 2.5" laptop drives get up to 2 terabytes in size, this thing'll support 'em.

Even without all the other bells 'n' whistles, just having a long-capactiy battery-powered firewire enclosure is interesting enough to warrant checking it out. The place sells it at $179 with no drive, and you can configure it with various drives at increasing price points.
 
Remember, that's for the enclosure only, no drive at the $180 price. But apparently that does include the external battery pack too, so there's enough battery juice (according to them) to handle 110GB of data transfer!
 
I hope they bring out a SATA version -- all the high-capacity drives are SATA only, PATA is disappearing fast.
 
Do you think there is a way to have a an adapter in order to offload the p2 card directly into the drive? It would only need a PCMCIA -> CF adapter, but I only find CF -> PCMCIA adapter.

And in fact I have already one Nexto that i bought one year ago. And it's true that it's very fast to load the cf card and to offload to the computer.
 
Okay, I snared one of these new on ebay for $150 for just the enclosure.

In short, it does what you want -- it's a battery-powered firewire enclosure. Not inexpensive, but then again, there really aren't any battery-powered firewire enclosures! This thing includes a built-in battery good for about 40gb, and an external battery said to be good for another 70gb, so consider it a 100GB offloading solution.

It does work with the HVX and HPX500, it works exactly like you'd want.

It doesn't do USB On-The-Go, so no big deal there but still it'd have been nice if it did.

It has a full-size 6-pin firewire port and it's bus-powered. Not from the HVX or HPX, of course, because those cameras don't supply bus power. But you pretty much don't need the AC adapter with you because when you plug it into your computer the bus power will power the drive, plus it'll charge the batteries.

It also has a slot for CF media, and I believe it can be used to offload other types of media through a CF->SD adapter or something like that.

However, the format the drive uses for those purposes, and the format the HVX/HPX want to feed it, are different. In fact, when the HVX or HPX formats the drive, the Nexto complains about "HDD format NOT compatible ". That doesn't affect the normal operation of an offload drive at all, but it's a little bit annoying to see that message. It also means you can't use the drive's built-in ability to xcopy compactflash cards, nor can you use the enclosure's ability to browse the contents of the drive.

But if what you're looking for is an HVX200 or HPX500 offloading enclosure, the NextoDI Ultra is the best I've found. Ignore the compactflash capabilities and it's pretty much an ideal HVX external drive enclosure. It's bus-powered, connects to the computer through firewire or USB, supports large-capacity drives, and has plenty of battery capacity.
 
Of course it is. A laptop with a PCMCIA slot is the #1 best accessory for an HVX200.

But if someone needs minimal size and just wants to offload cards, this is the only valid battery-powered firewire enclosure I've found yet...
 
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