Review: Sonnet Qio High-Speed File Transport Center

A Few Concerns

Of course, with all this power comes great responsibility. And the responsibility comes in the form of the PCI Express bus interface that is limited to an aggregate bandwidth of 250MB/sec. So you can try to connect four towers of drives and blow the door off your real-time capability, but the I/O system is capped at 250MB/sec.

In my work with the Qio, I found only minor issues to nit-pick. Primarily, the Qio system has to be connected in a certain order and plugged into a computer before booting up. As previously mentioned, at the time of this writing, it did not yet support "hot" connect. But given that current computers boot up so fast, I didn't find this bothersome at all.

The Qio has a white power LED that did not illuminate when power was applied to the Qio or when it was connected to the computer. When the computer was powered on, the LED illuminated, indicating that the entire system was powered up properly. It sort of makes sense, but I was initially confused when I plugged the power into the Qio and the LED stayed off.

Lastly, the individual slots do not have activity indicators like many media readers do. But the Qio connects to many disparate devices, so the concept of individual "media access" lights doesn't apply if you connect FireWire or external I/O interfaces. The fact that these are the most significant problems I could uncover is testimony to the polish that the Qio has. I'm glad that Sonnet took the time required to make sure it was right.

Conclusion

If you've been following me on Facebook, you've seen me repeatedly tout the Qio as the greatest accessory for a laptop, period. I also had the editors at the Dallas International Film festival give the Qio heavy use for a week, ingesting hundreds of gigabytes of stills and video from P2, CF, and SDHC cards for immediate editing and turnaround for world media outlets. After 1 day with the Qio, they were asking for contact information for Sonnet so they could buy one of their own.

Sonnet has crafted a beautiful solution that gives your laptop far more connectivity, power, and capability than ever before. The system is solid, and in pure professional parlance, it does what it says it can do. This is a great departure from much of the gear in the prosumer world that tries yet fails to achieve their touted goals on many levels. The Qio is, without a doubt in my mind, the most useful professional video production accessory for a laptop-enabled tapeless live production workflow that you can get.

Anthony Burokas (VidPro at ieba.com) of IEBA Communications has shot award-winning corporate video internationally and recorded events since the days of 3/4" tape. He is currently technical director for the PBS series Flavors of America and resides just outside of Dallas.