Sandisk Connect Wireless Media Storage Drives Unboxing & Overview
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2014-05-07
·
1,196 words · ~5 min read
0:05
The Arc midi R2 by fractal design features massive air flow and highly
0:09
flexible liquid cooling support click now to learn
0:12
more so the problem of not having enough storage space on your phone or tablet
0:17
has kind of been a thing for a while so to speak and the new thing to deal with
0:22
that thing is Wireless Storage so SanDisk is throwing their hat into the
0:25
ring with the SanDisk connect Series so this is the wireless flash drive and the
0:29
wirel media drive so these are intended to work with whether it's your PC or
0:33
your Mac or your iOS device or your Android device phones tablets computers
0:37
all that kind of stuff to expand your storage and allow you to access it
0:40
wirelessly so they both support uh WPA2
0:43
Wi-Fi protection access from around 150 ft they both support eight concurrent
0:48
users for file sharing but this is where things start to get a little bit
0:51
different so the flash drive let's do a quick tour of this one support streaming
0:55
video to up to three concurrent users comes with 16 gigs of storage in it by
1:00
default although you can increase that
1:04
now I think they call it expandable storage but I wouldn't quite call it
1:08
expandable storage because it's more like increasable storage because this
1:12
contrary to what you might think from its form factor is not actually a thumb
1:16
drive it's more of a micro SD card reader so it comes with a 16 gig micro
1:21
SD card inside there you go so there's a SanDisk Ultra card in there um it also
1:26
supports up to 4 hours of continuous streaming so that's around half the
1:31
battery life of the larger media drive and I think that was the other main
1:36
difference okay so fewer concurrent users for video and only 4 hours on a
1:40
charge next up we've got the wireless media drive which actually has a really
1:45
nice ID so this is more of the premium product so it's got kind of a nice
1:49
textured uh Square finish on the top of it actually looks quite striking and
1:54
then an aluminum band around the outside so there's the charging port it comes
1:58
with a charging cable as well as a wall wart that should be I'm guessing a 500
2:03
milliamp wall wart 300 milliamp wall
2:06
wart okay there you go and then also
2:09
this one has a power button right here and finally ah yes SD card expansion so
2:15
there's 32 gigs inside and you can actually add additional memory to it as
2:19
needed with a full-sized SD card this
2:22
one supports five concurrent users for video eight hours of battery life and
2:27
eight concurrent users for just general file sharing however with all of these
2:30
devices I could tell you oh yeah this one charges just by plugging in via USB
2:35
and then the power buttons here uh this one I mean the all these devices are
2:39
pretty much the same thing except it's going to come down to software support
2:42
so we're going to fire up the app and see how well it works so SanDisk
2:46
actually has two separate apps one for the pen drive and one for the media
2:49
drive so we used the media drive one just because they seemed to be pretty
2:52
similar otherwise if you've ever used one of these before you'll be familiar with this so you basically just connect
2:57
to the Wi-Fi network that it is it doesn't doesn't come with any Security
3:00
on it by default but the good news is that when you go into the settings here
3:04
I'm just going to go ahead and put this down right here so when you go into the settings it's really easy to figure out
3:09
the default admin stuff so you just uh put admin admin and then you can log in
3:14
update your firmware see your battery life all that kind of cool stuff which
3:18
is neat you also have a few different ways to browse your files so you I
3:22
generally prefer just looking at a directory structure so here we can check
3:25
out my resume see here you go I haven't done one of those in a long time yay
3:29
LinkedIn and then you can see there's some default music on
3:33
here so it goes ahead it plays within its own Media Player app and
3:38
unfortunately the media player app has very limited compatibility so we have
3:42
some Approaching Nirvana songs that it unfortunately wasn't able to play
3:46
because they are uh wave files um another example of sort of limited
3:51
limited compatibility was you can see uh MP4s are the ones that are supported by
3:56
the default app I wouldn't have minded seeing integration with third party apps
3:59
like o player so this Adventure Time video plays just fine but here's a much
4:05
higher bit rate file this is a 1080p file that I recorded with this phone and
4:09
unfortunately playing back wirelessly uh does stutter a little bit I don't know
4:14
if you guys can see that but it is able yeah see there it goes but it is able to
4:18
play it back because it is compatible um
4:21
other than that you're able to ah yes browsing photos so check this out it
4:25
comes with some preloaded photos so you can go ahead and check those out takes a
4:30
little while to load the first time so I was getting a little bit of loading time
4:33
before but you can see it's not nearly as bad anymore so that's my old computer
4:37
if you guys want to check that out got my all-in Wonder 9600 Pro in there so
4:41
basically the conclusion is very small very compact great ID particularly on
4:46
the media drive that is industrial design for those of you who aren't familiar with that but I would like to
4:51
see some more maturity on the app itself
4:54
one thing that I do like about it is that you have the option to download the
4:58
files locally should you so desire so that should eliminate any kind of like
5:02
stuttering or weirdness so I wouldn't mind seeing them um integrate sort of
5:07
other third party players with the files that you can play back or I mean you
5:11
look at how long someone like Seagate has been working on their Media Player
5:15
app and sort of how mature that is so I think we're probably going to see this
5:19
continue to evolve over time thank you for checking out this unboxing and
5:23
overview of sandisk's connect family of products don't forget to subscribe to L
5:26
techtips for more unboxings reviews and other computer videos don't forget to like video if you liked it don't forget
5:31
to dislike it if you disliked it and leave a comment and let me know what you thought of it one way or the other