Seagate’s premium brand, LaCie, and DJI have teamed up again and announced at CES this week the 2 TB DJI Copilot BOSS USB 3.1 Type-C Hard Drive. The DJI CoPilot comes with a $349 price tag. With 2 TB of storage users can expect to get 60 hours of 4K video at 30 frames per second or 20,000 raw images.
Users will be able to ditch their laptops while in the field to ingest data via SD card or a USB port. LaCie is also including in the bundle a microSD to SD card adapter. Once copied over, users will use a companion app for both Android or iOS to view their footage. With a built in display users will have confirmation that their data has been backed up to the CoPilot as well. The DJI CoPilot will allow users to charge their phones in the field via the power bank either by lightning, micro USB, or USB-C cables which are included. Once users return from the field they can directly connect the drive via a USB-C to transfer the data onto their system. It’s curious to me why the CoPilot was designed without an integrated microSD card slot. After all, don’t all DJI drones use microSD cards? Just one more adapter to potentially lose while in the field.
DJI and Seagate have teamed up in the past, last year bringing the DJI Fly Drive which allowed importing of data via an internal microSD card but did not have a battery pack or integrated screen. The DJI Fly Drive was branded not under LaCie but directly as a Seagate drive and offered at a fraction of the cost at $111.
There are already similar products on the market such as the the Western Digital 2 TB My Passport Wireless Pro and Gnarbox. The WD My Passport includes a conventional hard drive, however it also includes 802.11ac Wi-Fi capabilities for viewing data, or streaming HD videos and is priced at $149 for the 2 TB version. The Gnarbox on the flip side does include an SSD however currently users can only pick between 128 or 256 GB versions. The Gnarbox also includes wireless capabilities like the WD My Passport Wireless, but is priced at $399 for the 256 GB version.
This could be pretty handy if you fly a lot!
Sweet!
This is going to be perfect for me for trips where I don't want to lug around a laptop, (15" macbook pro's get heavy after a few weeks of travel!). It really is a shame that they didn't have an integrated microSD slot, as it wouldn't have been hard! at the very least having the SD Card slot recessed enough so that you could leave it plugged it all the time without it getting damaged/extending beyond the width of the drive would have been smarter!
I saw this @ CES at the DJI booth. It comes with a mSD card adapter, and you can safely leave the adapter inside the slot. I think they did this for flexibility on all the various devices out there that use SD. I also saw the product ingest from a Mavic directly, so the guy didn't have to mess with the removal of the mSD card from the drone. I think thats where you see the magic, this device recognizes the DJI products natively and directly. I also saw it suck down a UHS-II class card, it was registering something like 140/MBs in the demo the DJI guy was walking the crowd with.
That's great, definitely going to be on my to buy list then. Thanks for the clarification!