MacEffects, the company behind transparent cases for the Apple II, is now taking preorders for the Xdrive. This Apple II expansion card accepts a USB 3.0 drive or microSD card from which it can simultaneously mount up to eight disk images. Supported image formats include .PO, .DSK, .2MG, .ISO, .HDV, and .DO (but not .WOZ).
Disk images can be mounted one of two ways, per the manual:
Block mode is limited to 65535 blocks of 200h bytes each for a total of 32 MB storage and up to eight devices can be used in ProDOS, and is somewhat slower than SmartPort mode.
SmartPort mode uses SmartPort firmware calls and offers up to eight devices in both ProDOS and GS/OS. In GS/OS, the size of a device is limited to 8GB provided you use either an HFS volume or an ISO image.
The Xdrive is packaged with a 4 GB USB drive that includes various games and utilities, such as the Total Replay compilation.
The card, which will normally sell for US$95, has a preorder sale price of $85, with shipping expected to start by Sunday, February 9, 2025. Shipping within the USA will cost roughly $7.67 via USPS Ground Advantage.
While MacEffects is the distributor, the card itself was developed by Jeff Mazur and Dean Claxton under the name JD Micro, which previously brought us the ROMX. The Xdrive was previewed earlier this month by Dean Claxton and Javier Rivera on Javier’s YouTube channel.