Sharing is Easy with the SanDisk Connect Wireless Media Drive

One of our favorite devices we reviewed last Summer was the SanDisk Connect Wireless Flash Drive that we highlighted in our article, 10 Family Tech Tools for the Open Road.  It’s a flash drive that you can store your pictures, videos, and music on and through its own hotspot, you can connect up to 6 mobile devices to stream or view the data from the drive.

This year, we are reviewing the SanDisk Connect Wireless Media drive which looks more like a square disk rather than a thumb drive.  The benefit of the SanDisk Connect Media Drive over the Flash Drive is that you can add a SDHC/SDXC card to the Media drive to either:

1.) instantly add more disk space to the drive or

2.) to take the SD card from your camera/camcorder and add it to the Media Drive to instantly watch and share photos with other streamers from the drive

For example, you could be taking pictures are a party on your camera, insert the camera’s SD card into the SanDisk Connect Media Drive and start viewing the pictures and videos on your phone or tablet.  Invite others to join your hotspot and they can download the pics on their phone…on the spot!  It’s easy.

We recently had my daughter’s Odyssey of the Mind team over for an end of project party.  I had taken hundreds of pictures of the kids as they created their script, learned to saw, drill, and paint, created scenes and props, and rehearsed.  I knew their parents would be interested in having some of the pictures, so I copied them all to the SanDisk Connect Media Drive.  If anyone asked for them, I could give them access through the SanDisk app and they could select whichever pictures they were interested in and download them.  There was no worry about connecting to WiFi because you can connect directly to the SanDisk Connect Media Drive for access.  It works great.

I also recently took a trip to Oklahoma to see my niece graduate from Oklahoma University.  During my trip, my beautiful niece turned 22, it’s hard to fathom where the time went.  Before leaving, I searched on my computer for any pictures with her name on them and loaded them onto my SanDisk Connect Media Drive via a mini USB cable.  Once there, I connected my smartphone to the SanDisk Connect Media Drive and using Miracast (a screen mirroring setting on my Android phone) and the Cellulon PicoAir projector (highlighted in our Mother’s Day Guide), I was able to project pictures on the wall of my niece growing up.  It was particularly fun because most of the pictures she had never seen before.  We all had a great time watching them and the timing was perfect to celebrate her growing up as she was about to graduate.

Features:

• Comes with 32GB or 64GB storage
• Works with iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Kindle Fire, and Android devices
• Can store media  files on the media drive to share with other mobile devices and laptops
• Can encrypt with a password
• Comes with charging cable
• Streams up to 150 feet
• Includes a SDHC/SDXC card slot for instant sharing of pictures/videos taken from your camera
• Add SDHC/SDXC card to increase storage capacity
• Non-slip base
• Can stream up to 8 hours per charge
• App is available for iOS and Android

Pros:

• View pictures right away from your camera by plugging in its SD card into the SanDisk Wireless Media Drive
• Small but feels sturdy
• Can connect 8 devices to the drive simultaneously
• Share pictures with friends (once they download the app) so they can easily save files from a common event
• Supports up to 5 simultaneous HD video streams, but optimized to stream 720ppi videos
• Has SD card slot to enable you to view files on the SD card in the same way as viewing files from the Media Drive
• Can connect media drive to power source while in use
• Pocket-sized – easy to travel with
• You can even access the drive wirelessly from your laptop or PC to add or move over files
• You can even connect to your media drive wirelessly from your PC
• The app shows you how much battery capacity you have left as well as available memory on the drive

Cons:

• No pouch to protect it
• Free app is not the most intuitive
• You cannot copy files from the SD card to the SanDisk Connect Wireless Media drive
• Cannot be connected to your PC and use it as a wireless media drive too
• Cannot view the RAW files taken by your camera, but it will read the other smaller photo files
• When you have a lot of files on the drive, you don’t see all the thumbprints of your pictures, but click on any color boxes and your picture appears

A Mom’s Perspective

I’d have to say that the SanDisk Connect Media Drive is the sleeper gadget of the year.  Meaning, it will never get the coverage that a new phone or laptop will get, but it has the potential to dramatically rock your world if you love to share pictures/movies and/or take road trips with your kids.

Think about being on a road trip with your kids.  Give them each a device of their own connected to the SanDisk Connect Media Drive, give them each a pair of headphones, and stream a movie from the media drive to their tablets/phones.  They can each watch the movie (and pause it) at their own pace.

In fact, up to 5 people can stream a HD movie at once, so if you have a whole car full, let them all watch the same movie…or different movies, it makes no difference to the media drive.

Have a bunch of files you need to take with you?  Throw them on the media drive.  I threw an amazing number of pictures on mine…13,998 to be exact, 203 videos, and 149 songs on the SanDisk Connect Media Drive when I went to visit my niece.  And guess what?  I still have 11.5 GB of space left!

*  I was given a SanDisk Connect Media Drive for purposes of review.  All opinions are my own.