CalDigit AV Drive review. USB 3.0 comes to the Mac!

December 1, 2016October 25, 2010 by Dan Carr

Let’s face it, we all spend more time at our computers than we want to these days. With digital camera manufacturers pushing megapixel and file sizes higher and higher, and HD video becoming the norm, we are constantly in need of more hard drives. On top of a need for reliable storage space I’m always looking for a way to speed up my workflow and hence spend less time in front of the monitor. A couple of months ago storage solution specialists CalDigit announced a new addition to their external drive lineup, the USB 3.0 packing AV Drive. On top of this they simultaneously released a Mac compatible PCI USB 3.0 cards as well as an Expresscard USB 3.0 adapter for Mac laptops with expresscard slots.

Apple iPad for photographers. What use is it?

September 12, 2023May 5, 2010 by Dan Carr

A few days ago Apple announced that it has sold 1 million iPads in the device’s first month on sale. Less than half the time it took the original iPhone to achieve the same feat. Lots of photographers like a good gadget and many are users of other apple products already, but is there actually any practical use for one? It seems as if the iPad might be the catalyst for a fundamental change in the way that we receive what was previously “printed” media. The iBook store has sold 1.5 million books along with that first 1 million iPads …

Creating a bootable external drive in OSX and why you should think about doing it.

December 1, 2016April 28, 2010 by Dan Carr

Catchy title huh? This is a short post but one that I hope might help a few people out. Firstly, if you are a PC user then i’m afraid I can’t help you with all the details, but at least read the first few paragraphs to find out why you might want to do this. In the past 18 months I have had three hard drive failures, 2 in laptops and one in an external USB drive on my desk. It happens and I hope by now we all know that. I’m not going to preach on backing up your files, that’s for another time…..

A few times in the last few months I have found myself working in a location that is fairly remote. No Apple store or computer parts store within a thousand miles, and not somewhere that gets any kind of speedy mail-order servicing either. So what would happen if one of my laptop hard drives had failed in one of those locations? This is mostly relevant to photographers who travel a lot, and especially those who visit remote locations, but the solution is actually fairly simple and remarkably cheap. A bootable external drive that can run Mac OSX is the answer. It doesn’t even need to be a 2.5″ hard drive, you can actually boot to Snow Leopard directly off a USB keyring as long as its big enough!

Hyperdrive Colorspace UDMA review.

September 12, 2023November 26, 2009 by Dan Carr

This past Autumn I was in Mexico on holiday. I took my newly purchased Canon S90 camera with me and was having a great time snapping pics with that little thing. The quality of the shots coming out of that tiny thing was really blowing me away. I wasn’t traveling with a laptop computer so my photos remained on the camera’s memory card. Unfortunately, on the fifth day of my trip, my camera was stolen while I was in a restaurant. This was the first time I have ever lost photos and I was truly gutted, more so than I ever thought I would be. I didn’t give the camera a second thought, but all I could think about was all the photos I had just lost. When I got back home I started to look into some possible solutions to this problem in the future. Sometimes it’s just not practical to travel with a laptop, so how do you keep your photos safe?

Portable Storage – LaCie Rugged drives

May 24, 2019July 20, 2009 by Dan Carr

I just picked up another LaCie Rugged drive for an upcoming trip to New Zealand so I thought I’d take a second to post about them. The Rugged line of drives from LaCie are designed with the traveling photographer in mind and are encased in a protective rubber shell. I have been using a 120gb Rugged for about 2 years now and it has been faultless so far. If you take a look at the larger version of the photo on the left you will even see a sizable dent in the case on the top but still it keeps …