Road test Last week Vulture South got its hands on an intriguing SanDisk product called the “Connect Wireless Stick”.
It's a USB stick with WiFi built in and is intended
as networked storage for mobile devices. The idea is that you'll load
the stick full of music and movies, then install the companion app on
your iThing or Android and then point their WiFi at the stick. And all
without touching on the precious internal memory capacity of your mobile
device, or burning through mobile download allowances.
Because it also behaves as a normal, boring, USB
stick you can also plug it into a Mac or PC and use the device as a
normal, boring, USB stick. That's how SanDisk imagines you'll get
content onto the device. You'll be charging the device's four-hour
battery as you load content.
Which got your correspondent wondering if it could
also work as a file server for PCs if permanently plugged in to a power
source.
The answer is a “yes”.
To get it done, configure the Wireless Stick so that
it connects to your WiFi network instead of peer-to-peer with mobile
devices. Next, go into Settings/About and find its IP address. Type that
IP address into a browser on a PC or Mac.
You should soon see the device's web interface which
makes it easy to download the stick's contents and perform drag-and-drop
uploads from a PC or Mac to the stick.
I was also able to mount the drive on both Mac and
PC. On OS X open the Finder, use the Go menu, select “Connect to
Server”, feed in the IP address and – presto! - the device's root
directory should spawn a window in the Finder. Under Windows I used Map
Network Drive and fed it the address \\xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx\files\. Up came
the stick as a network drive.
The device is no speed demon: I uploaded a 100MB file
over my domestic 802.11ac router and it took 3.5 minutes to finish the
transfer. The same job took 22 seconds when I used the first
conventional USB stick I could find on my desk and transferred the file
from a Mac to the stick.
Downloads are faster: the 100MB file made its way
from the stick to my Mac in a rather better 48 seconds. Those results
are fair enough as cheap NAND in USB sticks isn't optimised for writes.
The Connect Wireless Stick comes in a 200GB variant, a
decent amount of storage that might just hint at shared storage
possibilities. I can't imagine using this as serious storage even though
the web interface means setup is swift, simple and probably rather
easier to arrange than sharing a volume and connecting devices over
WiFi.
But for sheer fun it has appeal as a campfire NAS - a
“Campfiler” if you will - plugged into a USB battery. Because who can
go camping these days without shared storage?
And who can end a story without a pause to ponder
security, because if your people are connecting directly to this
device's WiFi it looks like an interesting way to challenge data loss
prevention tools.
Amazon has the 32GB, 64GB, 128GB and 200GB models at $US23.99, $33.42, $70.99 and $93.99 apiece.
