It has always bothered us that in the 23rd century Starfleet couldn’t do more for poor Captain Pike than that blinking light. Heck, he couldn’t even Morse code “Help me… Spock!” with that blasted chair.

So in some ways, StarTech.com’s InfoSafe USB 2.0 On-the-Go Drive Enclosure is actually more advanced than what Starfleet will be using a couple hundred years from now. After all, it has three blinking lights to tell you its status—one for disk access, one for error, and one to tell you it’s full.

The aluminum InfoSafe is similar in concept and size to the generic 2.5-inch USB drive enclosures you can pick up for $20 at the corner tech store. You just add your own 2.5-inch notebook drive (with a maximum height of 9.5mm) to it. The unit doesn’t have an internal battery, but you get an AC adapter and AA battery pack for field use. Slaved to your PC, it works like a standard external drive, but on its own, you can back up files from a memory card by plugging your card reader and card into the USB cable. The InfoSafe’s performance is pretty peppy. Using a SanDisk Extreme USB reader rated for 18MB/s reads and a 2GB SanDisk Extreme III card rated for 20MB/s reads, we copied a card full of images in about 3:17 (min:sec). That’s faster than the Transcend StoreJet OTG (reviewed below) by about 40 percent, although the comparison is a little unfair because the InfoSafe’s performance will vary depending on the hard drive you choose. (We used a 5,400rpm 40GB Travelstar.)

Performance aside, our problem with the InfoSafe is that its threadbare Captain Pike interface sometimes left us wondering if the device had really backed up our images. Would you feel comfortable erasing that once-in-a-lifetime shot after using the InfoSafe? We sure wouldn’t.

The InfoSafe is a fancified notebook hard-drive enclosure.

startech, InfoSafe USB 2.0 On-the-Go Drive Enclosure
www.startech.com

Leica M3

It’s cheaper than dirt.

Holga 120s

Needs to have confirmation
tone to convince you it actually
copied your files.