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For years, I have lamented my inability to properly back up and secure my huge swaths of digital photos and videos. I've been working as a commercial videographer and filmmaker specializing in timelapse, video production and aerial photography in San Francisco since 2014, and have been reviewing cameras and testing...
When evaluating hard drives, rare is the instance where I get to really stress test something. Like really stress it. Drives like the G-Tech ArmorATD and the LaCie Rugged are designed to get banged around, but within certain constrained parameters. They are designed to be shipped in FedEx boxes, not dropped down a flight...
I usually start these hard drive reviews by mentioning how far a company has come, or the changes they have made in contrast to their normal paths, or mentioning what their competitors are doing, but I can't do that here. I can't bury the lede that much because I'm sure you've noticed, this thing looks super weird. We...
Four years ago I threw a G-Technology EV ATC into the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Francisco, and the drive lived to tell the tale. There aren't that many drives that are water resistant and crush resistant, so this was, back then, a big deal. G-Technology's latest portable HDD, the ArmorATD, isn't as rugged as...
We review a lot of hard drives here at Imaging Resource, but mostly from Seagate, LaCie, G-Technology and Western Digital because a large number of their products are targeted at the photo/video space. But when you look at who owns those companies, it's actually just two: Western Digital and Seagate. So while these are...
Getting an Atomos external recorder has legitimately changed, for the better, how I shoot video, and how good the footage I shoot looks. I went for years recording just to memory cards (going so far as to collect more than 8 CFast cards so that I could shoot on higher-end cameras) instead of acquiring an external...
I have a sort of... obsession with fast storage drives. As a San Francisco commercial videographer and filmmaker with terabytes of 4K+ content in my possession, being limited by the speeds of my storage media feels like a problem with way too many solutions nowadays to let stand unchallenged. It's why I run large RAID...
Near the end of 2017, LaCie released the 2big Dock, a two-disk RAID 0/1 desktop drive designed to be a part of a ingest/work/store solution that took advantage of Thunderbolt's speed and daisy-chain capabilities. But the 2big Dock, as good as it is in its use case, was built with a very specific workflow in mind: you...
The USB-C format I think is finally coming into its own. I remember not too long ago that those of us with a MacBook Pro that only had USB-C ports were lamenting the lack of support for the format. But now, in 2019? There is a wholly new problem: the paradox of choice.
Where we once only had maybe one or two options...
This is going to sound crazy, but as a professional commercial videographer / filmmaker for the last five years in San Francisco, I only recently had to start using external recorders. My clientele was the kind where we didn't have to always shoot in log, we generally could get our shots to look good in camera, and I was...
It's important to me for my hardware to look as good as it functions. I have to like using something in order for me to keep using it, and a huge part of that is aesthetics. G-Tech and LaCie get that, for the most part. Specifically, with the latter, I've been nothing but impressed with the last two products I've seen...
I think we have started to enter the golden age for traveling creators. Photographers and videographers alike now have so many options for cameras, lenses, bags and other tech that we can get just about anything we would need from many options across multiple vendors all for a relatively affordable price. Just about...
Keeping the many different G-Technology portable drives straight just based on their names can be a real challenge. In the past couple years we've evaluated the G-Drive Mobile SSD and the G-Drive Slim SSD USB-C, and those are separate from the G-Drive Pro SSD and the G-Drive Thunderbolt 3 which are larger, desktop backup...
UPDATE, 10/16/2018: In the market for an ultra-fast, rugged SSD drive? This SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD is on sale today at Amazon in all capacities, including the 1TB size for just $199! Sale Over
Small, portable and high capacity storage drives are more and more becoming the norm. There was a time that...
Recently we reviewed the latest G-Drive with Thunderbolt 3 from G-Technology, and found it to be a pretty solid drive aside from its relatively average read/write speeds. It seems G-Tech wanted to prove they could go faster with the release of the G-Drive Pro SSD, and boy did they ever. Rated to hit 2800 MB/s, this...
If you've ever taken your camera, or drone, out into the wilderness for more than an afternoon, you might know the unease that comes with being away from a backup solution. This is especially the case with drone work, as you always want to be backing up your cards, or at the very least switching them out, every time the...
In early March, Nikon Rumors reported that fledgling memory company ProGrade Digital would not be making XQD cards, instead betting on the new format CFexpress. This rumor was later confirmed by DP Review. For those who are not close to the memory industry, this was somewhat of a shock, as XQD is a format popular with...
As a video editor, I'm regularly looking for a good portable hard drive that can serve a couple different purposes. Some I'm looking to box up and mail across the country to different marketing firms or editing companies, others I'm looking to carry with me when I have to leave the office but still need immediate and...
In the fall of 2016, I found myself in a warmly lit, large and bright conference room accentuated by a beautiful sunny day streaming in from wide windows in the Silicon Valley office of Micron. Micron, the at-the-time parent company of memory card goliath Lexar, was celebrating the memory card company’s 20 year...
Memory cards aren’t sexy. They’re not the part of a photographer’s kit that makes a photo better, and they don’t get a lot of praise. Honestly, the only times you really hear a photographer talk about a memory card is when they have a failure, or if something gets corrupted. If something goes wrong, you can bet a...