4. Full Functionality Only With An Additional Hard Drive

Although videos can be replayed from the multimedia cards, storage space on this media is very expensive. Only a hard drive in 2.5" or 1.8" format will turn the MVP Player into a real movie player. And you have to buy that extra. An 80 GB hard drive costs just under $160. By comparison, for a compact flash card with 8 GBs you'll have to shell out $5000. Moreover, hard drives are considerably faster than multimedia cards.

The MVP Player solution from AOpen is designed so that the hard drive can also be used as external media for data backup. The connection is made via USB; no other applications are needed. So you can kill two birds with one stone. You only need to watch out for formatting. The player only detects the FAT16 or FAT32 file format (file system maximum 128 GB), but not NTFS.

Handy: fits into any shirt pocket

At the center, terminal strip of the hard-drive case for the MVP Player, on the right the port for the USB connector cable

Installing the drive is child's play: simply connect the mini-IDE adapter provided

We'd like to add a few tips on the hard drive: according to official specifications, the USB interface can handle a current load of 500 milliamperes. Although we had no problem on internal tests, the hard drive might cause trouble with the USB interface of certain PCs. It is well known that older models - particularly motherboards with VIA chipsets - do not comply with this specification. Moreover, the starting current on older hard drives is higher than 500 mA. Modern PC systems and newer notebooks, on the other hand, have sufficient reserves for error-free operation.