G-Tech’s Evolution Series.

 
The media storage announcements last week at NAB were pretty boring, with one single exception: G-Tech’s Evolution Series. There are three flavors: G-DOCK ev, G-DRIVE ev and G-DRIVE ev PLUS.
 

The G-DOCK is a Thunderbolt, two-bay, swappable drive system. Consider it as the “housing” and main component of the Evolution family, and it can be configured as RAID 1 (protected) or RAID 0 (performance). Click here to learn more about RAID Systems.
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Cloud Storage Solutions and Adobe Lightroom.

 
In the past couple of weeks, we have done several One-on-One Consulting sessions where the “Cloud Storage” question came up. This is a very quick overview of the most popular online storage options with pricing and direct links to each.

My own situation:
• My Lightroom Catalog has 70,000 RAW Images. I shoot a lot, but I am merciless editing.
• The entire catalog (NOT the RAW files) takes about 26GB of space.
• The RAW files take about 860GB of space.

This means I need about 900GB of storage space if I wanted to move my Lightroom Catalog, including all RAW files, to the Cloud.

Dropbox customers are provided with 2 GB for free. 

100 GB
Monthly $9.99
Yearly $99.00

200 GB
Monthly $19.99
Yearly $199.00

500 GB
Monthly $49.99
Yearly $499.00

IMPORTANT: If you don’t have a Dropbox account, use this link to get started. You get 2GB for free, and we both get an additional 500MB as a bonus. Hurry up!

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Reliable RAID Systems, an overview.

 
Professional photographers and filmmakers,  are always (and should be) concerned with storage devices, such as hard drives to create reliable backups and efficient workflows. All hard drives will fail eventually, that is why using RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) systems is often our recommended strategy. A RAID is a set of connected hard drives designed to store digital files and information in a much more reliable manner. Most current RAID units can also monitor a Hard Drives’ system health, fan, and power supply and warn users when there’s a potential failure.

There are several different levels at which a RAID system can be configured. In the photo and video industry, we generally use RAID levels 0, 1, 5, and 6. One way to remember them is: Fastest (0), Mirror (1), Safe (5), and Safest (6).

Interested in learning more about RAID systems? Then read this article we recently wrote for Canon’s Digital Learning Center to better understand how they work, their differences on performance, compatibility and size. Don’t wait until it’s too late to establish a good backup strategy! If you need help, don’t hesitate to contact us.

 

 

Conversations with Friends.

 
Today we start with Episode 001 of our bi-weekly series “Conversations with Friends.”

The goal is to meet with different people we find interesting (and opinionated) and simply chat about trending topics, recent developments in technology, new toys that we like or hate and simply have a good time while enjoying a glass of wine.  On today’s episode I talk with Justin Katz about the Eye-Fi Pro X2 8GB Wireless Memory Card. Did we like it? Watch to find out.

If you want to participate on our conversations or would like us to cover a specific topic just post a comment or shoot me an email.

Next week I’ll add the link with step-by-step instructions on how to set up the Eye-Fi Card on an iPad, an Android Tablet, and a Mac Book Pro. Here are the card’s features.

The wine we tasted was the 2009 Casarena Malbec, Mendoza, Argentina. It was very good and a great buy for $14.

Some (bad) news about Hard Drives.

 
The Hard Drive world has seen a lot of action lately.

When inventory levels plummeted 90 percent in less than a week after the Thailand flood in October, the top-selling hard drives on Newegg.com and Tigerdirect.com went up anywhere from 50 up to an absurd 150 percent. Over the past few weeks, Hard Drive prices are finally starting to drop, and the trend should continue throughout the year until supply meets demand sometime around Q3 2012. AppleInsider did a fascinating analysis on this topic by extrapolating MacBook Pro pricing.

On related news, Apple is apparently in the process of acquiring Anobit, which makes chips that greatly increase the performance of flash memory on devices like the iPhone 4S.

Seagate Technology completed the acquisition of the hard disk drive business of Samsung Electronics for $1.4 billion in stock and cash. The deal was approved in Australia, China, and the E.U.

In 2010, HDD shipments from both Seagate and Samsung represented 40 percent of the HDD market. Western Digital and Hitachi Global Storage Technologies still held the number one position with a 50 percent share. Western Digital intends to buy Hitachi Global Storage Technologies for $4.3 billion in cash and stock and the acquisition is expected to be finalized by March.

The mergers are not good for photographers, filmmakers, and any creative relying on desktop hard drives. With Western Digital’s acquisition of Hitachi, and Seagate’s acquisition of Samsung’s segment, the two companies will control approximately 90% of the market.

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Why Hard Drive prices are going (way) up.

 

Approximately 65% off all hard drives are made in Thailand; another 20% have components made there as well.  A single facility in Bang Pa-In owned by Western Digital produces one-quarter of the world’s supply of “sliders,” an integral part of hard-disk drives.

Since July’s flood, I have received notifications that prices have an immediate price increase for external hard drives but it will be less noticeable for laptops and desktop computers due weakened demand. According to the New York Times, those companies whose facilities were not damaged, such as Seagate, might see an increase in profit margin to about 30 percent from about 20 percent before the floods. Actually, Seagate’s share price has increased 60% in one month!

If you have been planning on getting a new hard drive, buy it now. If you are shooting HDSLR video or are planning to start anytime soon, you will need a faster, bigger hard drive, buy it now.

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