Those clever Korean’s at Nexto DI have been at it again. At first glance this might appear to be one of the original NVS2500 backup devices, which in itself is a very clever device that in my mind no self respecting solid state shooter should be without. However this is actually the new NVS2525 and Larry (hello Larry) from Nexto gave me a quick demo of it’s new features.
The main external change is the removal of the CF and SD cards slots from the top. These have been replaced with a dedicated slot for P2 cards. As before SxS cards slot in to an express card slot in the side of the unit. For SD, CF, MS and all those other sticks that you might one day use, an adapter is supplied that slides in to the express card slot. This has improved the speed of offload for these cards and now CF cards can be backed up almost as fast as SxS cards. Once again the backup speed is impressive, 80MB/s, yes Mega Bytes! In Larry’s demo he offloaded 2Gb of SxS data in 27 seconds, very impressive. But it doesn’t end there. The Nexto uses a hard drive internally for storage. I’ve had my 2500 for about a year now and I have dropped it, banged it around, taken it to the arctic and storm chasing. Despite this it has been 100% reliable. However despite the built in crash protection, gravity sensor, sector checking and all the other safety features, it is at the end of the day a single hard drive. So what Nexto have added is the ability to write to an external drive. The NVS2500 can also write to an external drive, but the difference is that the NVS2525 can write to it’s internal drive as well as an external drive…… in parallel. So backing up your valuable data takes exactly the same amount of time as before.. 27 seconds for 2Gb, but now you have two copies on two drives.

This is what a lot of production companies have been waiting for. Safe, secure, backups with full verification on to two separate drives without the need for a laptop or any other bulky gear. You can use most bus powered 2.5? esata drives for the external backup drive. Nexto supply a nice looking wallet style case that holds both the NVS2525 and the external drive.
While I was talking to Larry I also spotted a Nexto DI box with red rubber buffers. This one it turns out has been developed specifically for backing up SxS cards from the Arri Alexa. The other little box in my pictures is an external battery pack for the Nexto DI devices. It has a little LED battery meter and looks really nice. Perhaps Larry could give us some more info?