XDrive & A Pocket PC Make Beautiful Music Together

[Jon Westfall]

<img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/title_logo.gif" /><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.xdrive.com">XDrive</a> has been around for a long time by internet standards. I remember playing with it in the late 90's, when everything was coming out for free (i.e. free web space, free file space, free email, free etc...) before the bubble burst! About a month ago, I decided to give XDrive a chance again, and purchased a paid account so I could evaluate it for my needs. XDrive gives its users 5 GB of online storage for a little under $10 a month, allowing users to upload files from their PC and access them anywhere. The perfect solution for those of us who don't want to carry around USB flash drives or CD-Rs everywhere we go. My previous solution to this was to email myself a file, so in theory, this is much better (In practice, I'm still undecided on it...).<br /><br />Recently, XDrive announced a new premium service designed to allow users to listen to music over the internet through their PCs or mobile devices. As outlined <a href="http://www.xdrive.com/explore/music.jsp"> on their "Your Music. Anytime" page </a>, Their service allows you to upload your music, create play lists, and listen on the go. They offer a 15-day free trial - anyone want to take it for a test drive and report back?

[brianchris]

I recently tried out Xdrive for two to three months on both my laptop and desktop (and would have eventually incorporated my PocketPC somehow), BUT I ran into a HUGE problem with their service: any data transfer to or from them was INCREDIBLY slow......like two minutes to save changes in a simple single worksheet Excel file, and that wasn't even over their SSL connection! The extreme slowness even caused a corruption in one of my files, which was ironic becuase I was evaluating them primarily for backup purposes.

I don't know whether they didn't have enough bandwidth to their data center(s), or their servers were overtaxed, but it was an unusable solution, and this was from very fast connections on my end, and I canceled only a couple weeks ago, so its a recent issue. I'd like to consider them, so if anyone else posts with different results, I'd be interested.

[surur]

5 GB for $120 per year! What a rip off!

A better solution would be a static IP address for much less and running a FTP server or something similar. Unlimited storage at the speed of your home connection. Streaming directly from your own collection. No uploading that will take days. You could even use a dynamic ip address with a free service such as no-ip.

Let me say it again... Major rip-ff.

Surur

[Jonathan1]

eh *shrugs* I'm loving life with my 60GB iPod. I store a handful of ISOs, utilities, the first season of Battlestar Galactica '05 :D , etc on the thing along with my music. I figure it sort of evens out since

+1 to the iPod for being always available.

+1 to the service for not having to carry around a device.

+1 to the iPod for having more space.

+1 to the service for being accessible from multiple locations at the same time

+1 to the iPod for faster transfer rate.

+1 to the service for not being dependent on batteries.

It sort of evens out in the end.

[Jon Westfall]

5 GB for $120 per year! What a rip off!

A better solution would be a static IP address for much less and running a FTP server or something similar. Unlimited storage at the speed of your home connection. Streaming directly from your own collection. No uploading that will take days. You could even use a dynamic ip address with a free service such as no-ip.

Let me say it again... Major rip-ff.

Surur

As much as we'd like to believe everyone has broadband and could do this, sadly, many still do not. And those with broadband seldomly have as good an upload stream as download. While it might take you a minute to download a 20 megabyte file, it might take your computer 20 minutes to upload that same file to you on a distant network. As far as static IP - I pay an extra $40 a month to have a static IP and larger download bucket for my direcway system. In my case, $120 a year would pay for itself in 3 months if all I needed the static IP for was file storage.

[T-Will]

5 GB for $120 per year! What a rip off!

A better solution would be a static IP address for much less and running a FTP server or something similar. Unlimited storage at the speed of your home connection. Streaming directly from your own collection. No uploading that will take days. You could even use a dynamic ip address with a free service such as no-ip.

Let me say it again... Major rip-ff.

Surur

The problem I have with my home connection is that it only has a 30 kb/s upload rate, so it would be possible to stream music, but doing anything with larger files would be painfully slow, so I can see how a service like this might be useful (as long as they have higher bandwidth than my home connection).

[beq]

You guys might also want to try out www.Streamload.com [recent discussion (http://www.emailaddresses.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&amp;threadid=31976)].

They've revamped (again) awhile back. Explicitly no storage limits now for all paid subscriptions (instead of previously fuzzy policy of unlimited storage for common files and certain data types). From the start as I recall they'd always seemed to cater to really heavy users (cajoling ReplayTV/TiVo users to offload their hundreds of gigabytes of MPEG2 DVR archives, that sort of thing) ;)

I'd maintained their cheapest $38/yr subscription long ago, but had finally dropped it since I never ended up having a need to use it back then...

The thing I've always been curious about though is their supposedly vaunted proprietary storage technology or whatnot, how through the years they've been able to offer a much more generous value proposition than competing dedicated online storage providers. Not to mention the seemingly technical peculiarities of their system (from what my vague memory can recall):

- when you upload files that other users have already uploaded, the common data is somehow detected, and no redundant upload transfer takes place (for example you'd see your 50MB file upload finishes itself in a few seconds)... Perhaps that's why they don't offer normal FTP access for upload?

- when you upload a new file it takes awhile before that file actually becomes available and can be hosted online -- that's why I'd originally wondered whether they use a mixture of near-line (vs. on-line) storage systems, if that makes sense? Perhaps I exaggerate though, usually the delay's not that long...

[beq]

P.S. FWIW from what I recall in the past Streamload also had some multimedia streaming capabilities (though I forget the specific details). For example as in recognizing your video/music format files and making them streamable with enhanced features, or something...

In regards to performance concerns, my previous mild experience with Streamload was satisfactory. But I note that they themselves had seemed really proud of their bandwidth/backbone infrastructure. The (old) website contained lots of figures and explanations detailing their "practically limitless" uncapped bandwidth transfer rates or whatnot...

Sheesh it's hard posting something when you can't remember any of the details :)

[saru83]

quite interesing... :)

[howardholton]

I have been looking for a service like this for a long time and what I have come to realize is - nothing decent exists.

This is what I want:

1. Fast speed
2. 200 - 500 gb space - Not that I would be able to fill it easily, but I do not have to wonder if I am going to fill the space I paid for.
3. No transfer limit - I can grab the files as often as I want.
4. No software to install to upload / download files (web interface)
5. Software support for direct download (ie download manager - directly download to the internet drive, as opposed to my local machine) so I do not have a bandwidth limitation when I am downloading drivers and updates for all my machines from the internet. I realize that I would still have an issue when I went to use the file, but there are many times that I need a file on dozens of machines at multiple locations and this would be a big help. It would also be nice to send files directly there to have them waiting for me when I got home.

Anyone seen anything like this?