DIY Photography

Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time

Search

 

Submit A Story

Storage price per GB keeps dropping – unless you use 6TB drives

by Leave a Comment

It’s insane to think that hard drive space has gone from around $500,000 to as low as $0.03 per gigabyte in the last 36 years. It has, though. But that drop in price is slowing down. It has to. Even as recently as 8 years ago, drives were hitting under $0.10 per GB.

Backblaze recently had a look into just how hard drive prices have changed over the years, and they turned up something quite fascinating. One would expect that the larger the drive, the lower the per gigabyte cost. But it turns out that’s not quite happening in the real world.

[Read More…]

A simple DIY method for storing stands and tripods: use two bungee cords

by 3 Comments

If you’re looking for a neat and simple way for storing light stands, tripods and booms, guys from The Film Look have come up with a simple solution and they share it in their latest video. All it takes are some screws, hooks and two pieces of bungee cord, and you’re all set.

The stands and tripods usually end up crammed in a corner of the room or behind the door. This makes it difficult to reach the right one, especially if you’re trying not to tip over all the others. The storage hack from this video helps you organize the stands better, make them easily accessible, and also use up the otherwise unused space. And you’ll have to agree, it’s always good to use the extra space to the max.

[Read More…]

Western Digital launched its first portable SSD drive since merge with SanDisk

by Leave a Comment

Many thought Western Digital were a bit stuck in the times, clinging onto HDD technology. All the others were making the big push towards solid state, especially Seagate, and WD seemed to lag behind. Then, last year, Western Digital completed its acquisition of memory card manufacturer, SanDisk.

Now, Western Digital have unveiled its first portable SSD; The My Passport SSD. It’ll come in three capacities of 256GB, 512GB and 1TB, with a Type C USB3.1 interface. Set to compete directly with the Samsung T3 line of mini portable SSDs, it could see the prices dropping sharply over the next little while.

[Read More…]

Hacking hard cases to provide more storage

by 4 Comments

Rugged cases like Pelicans are great at protecting your gear. They’re waterproof, climate proof, indestructible and makes a great apple box when you need to sit or stand on something. After having more camera equipment than I am willing to carry on my shoulders, I bought a Pelican 1560 with padded dividers to carry it all.

The way the cases are structured, it is very difficult to put anything large inside, like reflectors or umbrellas into the case, and it is also very space consuming / uneconomical to put things like clamps and power cables and grip equipment inside the case, and almost always stupid to put water bottles inside the watertight case.

[Read More…]

How To Copy Large Video Files to a USB Flash Drive or Other FAT32 Storage Device

by 7 Comments

Most of the time I deliver finished photos and videos to my clients via digital download. It’s quick, easy and saves me time and money by avoiding the hassle of uploading files to a physical storage device and sending it in the mail.

However, it is occasionally necessary to copy photography and videos to a USB flash drive for delivery to a client (some clients don’t have reliable high speed internet, some want a physical product, some don’t have a reliable PC and some are just not tech savvy enough to figure out how to download a large number of files from a link).

One issue that I have started to run into – especially with longer or 4K video – is transferring files larger than 4 GB to a USB flash drive.

Fortunately, the solution is relatively easy – here is how to copy files larger than 4 GB to a USB flash drive, memory card or other FAT32 storage device.

[Read More…]

How To Build Your Own NAS From Scratch (With Parts List!)

by 22 Comments

Computers and data storage are almost as important to photographers and cinematographers as cameras. If you’re serious about keeping all of your photos and videos safe and secure in one place – sooner or later you will want a network attached storage solution (NAS).

There are many commercially available NAS options, but with a little elbow grease you can also build your own high performance NAS from scratch and save money – continue reading to learn how!

[Read More…]

You could probably store your photographic life’s work on Seagate’s new 60TB SSD

by 8 Comments

When I upgraded from 386 to 486, my hard drive went from a measly 40MB to a whopping 240MB. Totally blown away. Look at all this extra space I have! That was 22 years ago. Since then, memory cards that store a thousand times as much are the size of a fingernail and cost relatively little. 2-4TB hard drives are now also pretty commonplace and inexpensive. So, I’m kind of indifferent to the storage capacity race these days.

Then Seagate come along and announce a monster 60TB 3.5″ drive. This would be impressive even if it were just a regular old hard drive, but this thing is an SSD. To give you an idea of just how ridiculous this capacity is, Seagate put together a list of highlights. Right at the top, they mention that you can reach 1PB (1 Petabyte) with only 17 of them.

[Read More…]

Samsung’s tiny new Universal Flash Cards are five times faster than microSD

by 1 Comment

The current CompactFlash and SD Card standards have been around with us for a good while now.  CompactFlash has already had its dominance challenged in the new battle between XQD and CFast, but SD has thus far been relatively unscathed.

Samsung looks set to take SD head on with their new removable Universal Flash Card format, which packs up to 256GB onto a card about the same size of your thumbnail, but with performance five times faster than the fastest microSD cards available today.

[Read More…]

Western Digital becomes one stop shop for digital storage, completes acquisition of SanDisk

by 1 Comment

In an effort to branch out from the spinning disc technology of its hard drives, Western Digital have announced that they have completed their acquisition of SanDisk.

In a deal costing Western Digital $17 billion in cash and shares, it puts the company in a great position to compete with companies like Samsung in the solid state memory market.

[Read More…]

The Business Cost of Data Storage for Creative Professionals

by 7 Comments

In my recent article “Delete Your Sh!t: Why You Should Trash Most of Your Photos” I made a case to encourage photographers to permanently delete a large majority of their image files in order to minimize their data storage requirements (among the other benefits of a smaller catalog).

However, there seems to be an ongoing myth that data storage is inexpensive – so actively culling the data you choose to store is not necessary.

In this article, I though I would look at the actual business cost of data storage for creative professionals – because it adds up to a lot more than you may think.

[Read More…]

Recent Posts