LEVONO S10 for offloading SXS cards
 

I have been using my MBP in the field for offloading cards but I have been looking around for something smaller and lighter for dumping cards to and I found this:

A Levono S10 for $314.10

The S10 has a ExpressCard slot and a 160gb HD

I am sure it will not playback the HD footage smoothly but it should give you an idea of what you have and act as a good storage device.

Has anyone tried it in this regard?

To get the deal go to: http://www.lenovo.com/us/en/index.html and order one of the S10 that are on sale for $349 then use the code: USPTS10SAVE to bring it down to $314.10

Doing a bit of research looks like OS X can run on it too. Has anyone tried to do this and View SXS cards in OS X? I am ordering one and will test/post if there is any interest.

Got an s10 to do precisely this, but then ran into the problem of having everything else mac-based and not being able to get the media onto a pc drive and then onto mac drives. MacDrive software was not completely reliable.

Thanks for the feedback. Did you have OS X running on it?

Ordered one for $279 from tiger direct. I will leave feedback on how it works, I am thinking to try the OSX route as I got confirmation that the Expresscard slot is working in OSX. In fact the only thing not working is the onboard mic.

Adam--how are you running osx on this pc?

I must have missed something--are you talking about running OS X on this Levono? I didn't know one could do that.

I was wondering about that too. Can you not transfer the BPAV folder by some sort of network connection?

I have a S10 with OS X installed. Unless things have changed, there are no drivers for the PCI ExpressCard bus, only USB. So, the SxS cards won't show up, but the MxR cards do. I loaded up Clip Browser and was able to play a clip from the card. As you can imagine, it was very jerky. But, that won't prevent you from transferring clips to the HD.

Fascinating, Sean--did you install OSX yourself? Can you just install from a Leopard disk or does it need to be pre-configured at factory? The lack of expresscard support is too bad, but you could still load with USB.

Bob--how were you thinking the network would work? Wouldn't it be hard with such large files?

Probably. I don't know much about how you can connect a Mac and PC other than ethernet or wifi. Can you do USB to transfer files?

I installed OS X myself. if you go to Lenovo IdeaPad S Series Forum • Index page there's a mac section which should get you started. Also, let me clarify about the expresscard slot - it has two interfaces, PCI and USB. A SxS card, which is a PCI card, isn't recognized (because of no driver support). But, a MxR adapter and SDHC card is recognized in the Expresscard slot (since the MxR card uses the USB interface).

I can also address networking. You can get the wireless card to work, but the built-in ethernet doesn't (no drivers). I bought the apple usb to ethernet adapter and that happens to work just fine.

Thanks for the Info Sean. That sucks about the PCI drivers in OSX not working.

I think I will make mine a dual boot. The ExpressCard slot should work fine in XP right?

So I can use the XP version for offloading and viewing material (sort of). Then I can simply transfer the files to my Editing system Via a large USB Flash Drive.

Does anyone know if I can run the PC version of SXS transfer/viewer in Windows 7. I have heard that is runs great on the S10 (faster than XP)

By the way Sean I am in SD for the next month if you ever need a second EX1 :-)

When I got my S10, it had two partitions already, one with XP and a second one with backup/restore files. So, I kept the XP installation intact and installed OS X on the second partition. I haven't installed any XD-CAM software on the XP side, but I would assume it would work just fine - for both SxS and MxR cards. Good luck!

Thanks Sean... I will try that too.