New $2,500.00 AG-MSU10 P2 Portable Storage Unit

I got to play with the MSU10 for the last couple of days and think it's pretty fantastic. It's Very fast in copying to an SSD and the interface is simple. Plug a card in, hit Start and that's it.

Plus, having a LCD screen on it means you can check thumbnails to make sure the clips are there.

And you can shake the thing during copies with no worries about data damage.

Some more impressions and a couple videos here:

www.varicaminla.com/blog

it's definitely what the P2 Store needed to be, but never quite got there.
 
No playback.

Sounds pretty slow too. Like original back-in-the-day transfer speeds? Still, excellent tool to replace the P2Store (miss mine!) with the feature we'd all been begging for.
 
Have we had reports of transfer speeds yet? If transferring to a hard disk, the transfer speed will be limited by the hard disk speed. But if transferring to a fast SSD, you should be able to approach the maximum transfer speed of the card, so about two minutes for a 16GB "E" card...

I wasn't expecting playback, just hoping.
 
He had R-Series, so who knows, but here is what he said about in and out of verify mode transfers...

"This time I copied a full 8GB R series P2 card to its SSD drive, and it took 1 minutes, 34 seconds. That’s with Verification OFF. With Verification ON, the same card needed 3 minutes, 6 seconds…still pretty good!"
 
1:34 is pretty good for an R series. It takes me about 4 and a half minutes to copy an 8GB card to my laptop, so it taking about 1/3 the time for going to an SSD... that sounds pretty darn sweet.

8000 megabytes being transferred in 94 seconds gives you a data rate of 85 megabytes per second. The maximum theoretical transfer speed of an R series card is 80 megabytes per second, so (assuming slightly less than 8000 megabytes, of course) that sounds to me like this unit is transferring a card as fast as theoretically possible. Sure doesn't sound slow to me! :)

If the SSD can sustain 120 megabytes per second, then it should be possible to offload a 16GB E card in about two minutes, and a 64GB card in about 8 minutes.
 
I guess I always use verify, so the spec is roughly the same as I used to get on the original P2Store. About 4.5 mins against the 8GB cards. But yeah, verify off sounds good.
 
Erik, with Verify ON the MSU does an 8 GB card in 3:06. That's significantly faster than the 4.5 minutes you quoted for your old P2 Store. 50% yes?

Also I have a p2 store and don't remember it doing an 8gb card in 4.5 minutes with Verify On. Are you sure about that?

Also, the MSU's lack of moving parts is huge. You can start a copy and put it in your backpack while running to the next location. That's huge to me.
 
Wow, this looks really nice. (Albeit out of my price range at the moment..*sigh*) Now that they're done designing this, can I be really obnoxious and add ANOTHER feature request?

How about a video out so I can connect this to a smallHD or Marshall monitor and let the producer review shots while we're resetting for the next shot? HDMI would be nice, or perhaps a locking connector with composite break out cables, as on the HVX...

Hopefully Chater Camera and all the other rental houses here in the SF Bay will carry this for a reasonable day/wk. : )
 
Maybe a silly question, but could we put standard, non SSD HDD's in this? Might be nice for certain applications where maximum storage is more critical.

Peter
 
MSU10 First experiences

MSU10 First experiences

We just completed a verité feature and used the MSU10 to upload dailies and format cards for reuse on location during the day. The power save and sleep features results in incredibly long battery life. The download speeds with full verify on are comparable to the duel adaptor with the added assurance of full verification. Internal SSD drive means reliable data transfers and rock solid backups and the peace of mind to go ahead and format the card on set rather than back in the studio after triple backups have been created. I seem to remember reading somewhere that the unit also allows writing to a card but I couldnt figure it out so I may be mistaken. Unlike P2Formatter and just like the camera (HPX-3000), when cards are formatted in the MSU10 any name that has been given them with P2Formatter or MacOS is replaced with the generic NO NAME. It would be great if Pana could release a firmware update that would fix this so we Mac users could name our cards forever and treat them the way they should be treated as camera mags.

Any comments or further info greatly appreciated.
 
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