Eyefi Review: Hands-On With the Mobi Pro 32GB WiFi-Connected SD Card

[lowercaseperson]

Strictly, remote management cards on servers do nothing virtual. They are connected to a physical USB port in the host server, and they present a hub with several attached devices (keyboard, mouse, and potentially several mass storage devices). That's why something similar couldn't really be done with the EyeFi card.

Software could conceivably be made to talk to the EyeFi card as a remote filesystem, much like mounting a WebDAV share (look up FUSE), but that's much more difficult and error-prone than just transferring the files. After all, if you have a spotty WiFi connection, what happens if your machine tries to write to the remote volume? Data inconsistency, that's what.

The way they do it now is much simpler. Files just appear in a folder. One-way data transfer. With a little scripting, you can automatically import the contents of that folder into whatever DAM software you use. After Aperture's discontinuance was announced, I switched to Capture One, but I'm sure Lightroom could do the same.

Agreed - it is a little unfair to judge this new product from the poor transfer rates of those 5 year old cards. But to me the main problem was the fact that you had to export from the eyefi app back to iPhoto. Which clearly hasn't been fixed.

I would be *okay* with slower transfer speeds if it went straight into iPhoto.

 

[Zimmie]

No this is not true, it is completely possible to mount USB devices in software only. Both Synology and VMWare have a USB Mass Storage device emulator available. All you need to do is write a driver for it, just like mounting a RAID array. It's all a software driver.

I've seen it done.

I am unfamiliar with what Synology might do with USB mass storage emulation, but I'm not familiar with anything that VMware offers that is anything like that. VMware lets you mount disk images on a host machine like ISO images, but that has nothing to do with USB. It can also present a disk image to a guest as if it was connected storage, but that has a tenuous link to USB at best. The images are typically presented as a drive attached to an emulated IDE, SATA or SCSI controller. I've been on the Workstation, ESX(i) and vCenter side of things for a little over a decade and haven't messed with most of their user-facing software, so I may not have run across what you're talking about.

All of this is beside the point, though. If they really wanted, I'm sure the EyeFi people could make an extension that would mount the card as a remote network volume. Wireless networks are flakey, though. I would not trust such software for anything serious. Hard-line or bust!