OWC Mercury Accelsior ‘E2’ PCIe SSD Includes Two eSATA Ports (Mac Performance Guide)
One of the fastest upgrades you can make for your Mac is now available with 2 eSATA ports. I love cards that combine features, such as CalDigit’s eSATA/USB3.o card, as I’m always running out of slots on my Mac Pro. But like the CalDigit card, it looks like the Accelsior E2 doesn’t support port multiplication on the eSATA ports. Bummer.
Review: Data Robotics DROBO 5D (Mac Performance Guide)
Diglloyd does a comprehensive review of the new Drobo 5D RAID. Personally, I don’t like Drobo products as they use a proprietary system for their RAID management. If the RAID goes down, and you’re stuck with needing recovery services (very rare with a good RAID setup, but can happen), they will have trouble and the data may not be recoverable. It also looks like the Drobo draws heavily on the CPU during reads and writes, effectively making it a software RAID, and it really drags down performance. Even though this unit is equipped with Thunderbolt, it appears that Drobo’s own RAID scheme is the bottleneck.
Review: Canon 1DC (Philip Bloom)
A great in-depth video review of the 1DC, including camera raw files to download and play with.
Timelapse Basics – A Few Things to Consider When Shooting a Timelapse (Preston Kanak)
Preston put together a great timelapse tutorial including how to tell a great story, and not just what camera settings to use. A must read, even if you’re already a timelapse master. The end of the article includes links to post processing tutorials for JPEG and raw workflows.
This may be the best piece of advice: For the edit, I will assemble the low resolution jpeg images to see if they will work in the final piece. If they do, I will then process the RAW files. How much time have you spent assembling raw sequences, only to find out they don’t work? Go with the JPEGs initally to save yourself some time.
An Overly Cluttered Desktop Can Seriously Slow Down Your Mac—Clean it Up for a Noticeable Speed Boost (Lifehacker)
I remember hearing this years ago. I thought it was just a thing with older versions of OS X, but apparently it’s still an issue. I took a look at both my MacBook Pro and my Mac Pro, both having relatively clean desktops, and noticed large image folders from previous DSLR card dumps. Each computer had about 30,000 images in desktop folders. My MacBook Pro has been running sluggish, so I thought I would give it a try. I moved the image folders to other hard drives, and like magic, both computers sped up again. They even boot faster. Strange, but I’ll take it.