I read Michael Reichmann's review of the Colorspace UDMA and bought one partly on the strength of his endorsement. I have no doubt that he gave it a thumbs-up only after taking a seriously critical look at it. Well, it's a "YMMV" sort of world. After receiving the Hyperdrive, I have some grave reservations...
Support: Sanho was quick to respond to 'pre-sales' questions but they have been unresponsive so far to tech-support questions (a criticism I have seen in other reviews and forum messages about this equipment). Their e-mailed auto-responses include links for viewing one's own tech-support history. The links in the mail almost always point to invalid destinations on their web site. Someone is not minding the store...
Shipping: Sanho did a bad job of packing this equipment to ship. There was almost no padding around the factory box, and the whole package took a hard hit during shipping (large dent in one corner). The Hyperdrive itself was not padded within its inner compartment in the factory box -- it was free to rattle around inside. There's no excuse for that kind of carelessness in packing. The unit does appear to be working normally, but I have been down this road before: hard drives that take too hard a knock in transit can sometimes appear fine at the outset, then fail prematurely (and of course unpredictably).
Documentation: It's never surprising when, say, hardware engineers write bad documentation. The Hyperdrive documentation is no exception; it's very clear that the documentation wasn't written by an experienced tech writer with an "end-user focus." There are some functions seen in the menus that aren't mentioned or discussed in the manual. This kind of omission is inexcusable in a device this costly. It's especially irritating when the functions in question don't seem to work or aren't "intuitive". Compounding the documentation problem -- the PDF-format manual available on Sanho's web site was saved in a way that makes it un-searchable.
Display / color management: to my surprise, the Hyperdrive's EXIF displays for Nikon D3 raw files include "undefined" for the color space. Hogwash. The Exiftool program clearly displays a color space for these .NEF files -- whatever the user set for them in firmware. (To my surprise, JPEGs 'cooked' in the D3 really don't have an attached color space. I have no idea why that would be.)
The error in detecting the color space might be why, despite Sanho's mouth-watering promo shots of the Hyperdrive LCD displays, the color actually displayed on the LCD is downright dull. (The images I'm viewing on it are far more colorful on the LCD of the camera itself.) This is a major irritation; why pay so much extra for a display device when its displays are that inaccurate?
Power-saver mode: an older model of Hyperdrive I owned had a stupid, user-hostile feature of powering down when it was running on AC power. Likewise the Colorspace UDMA -- supremely irritating considering the time it takes to boot up (also mentioned in Michael Reichmann's review). If you're in the middle of reviewing something or performing a file operation, you lose your place and must start over. An auto-power-off feature makes sense when the device is running on batteries -- and no sense when it's running on AC power. Sure, dim the LCD if need be. But power all the way off? If that's a feature, who needs bugs?
My conclusion: the device might turn out to be fine in the end. But considering premium price, the problems, and (so far) Sanho's less-than-scintillating responsiveness: if I hadn't run out of time (my bad!) for getting a backup device prior to an overseas trip, I would have looked at alternatives. If Sanho responds to my queries and some of the problems can be solved, I might feel better about this thing. But right now I'm far from sold on it; the possibility of a drive failure due to subtle damage during shipping is making me very nervous indeed.
