Digital Camera News, Reviews and Tips
Online backup service Backblaze continues to post an enormous amount of data concerning its experience with over 40,000 hard drives from all the major manufacturers. This data is unique in that it demonstrates the real world failure rates from hard drives that are being pushed on a daily basis. That’s something I can’t do in a review of a single hard drive. [Read more…]
Every photographer needs more storage. To help you out, we’re giving away a 1TB WD Elements USB 3.0 portable hard drive this week. These are great little drives for toting photos and videos while you are on the move, and the USB 3.0 connection gives you the best throughput this portable drive can offer. [Read more…]
The WD 8TB My Book Duo external hard drive is one of the bigger dual drives in the My Book line (but there’s also a 12TB version). It can be configured in RAID 0, 1 or as a JBOD drive.
It is a USB 3.0 interface and comes pre-formatted in NTFS for Windows. However, I use it in a Mac environment and it was very simple to reformat it for Mac OS X. [Read more…]
Backblaze just posted its data on failure rates of hard drives that it uses in its data center. At the end of 2014, it had 41,213 drives active for storing all of the data in its unlimited backup service.
It uses a variety of hard drive capacities across HGST (formerly Hitachi), Seagate and Western Digital. There is everything from 1.5TB to 6TB drives in operation. [Read more…]
Western Digital has released its new My Passport Slim line of portable hard drives, which offer capacities in 1TB or 2TB flavors and a USB 3.0 interface. The My Passport Slim features an aluminum enclosure and 256-bit hardware-based encryption. [Read more…]
The Western Digital VelociRaptor Duo Thunderbolt drive is a power-user’s dream external drive kitted out with two 10,000RPM VelociRaptor drives. Inside the box, WD includes a Thunderbolt cable (a $50 accessory), which was missing from the original WD My Book Thunderbolt Duo.
The drive has two Thunderbolt ports, which allows you to daisy chain it with other My Book Thunderbolt Duo or VelociRaptor Duo drives. Additionally, you can add a displayport monitor at the end of the chain. [Read more…]
WD My Passport Edge Mac
The Western Digital My Passport Edge is one of the latest bus-powered USB 3.0 hard drives out there. There are both pre-formatted versions for the Mac and PC out there, currently priced at $99 and $89, respectively. [Read more…]
Western Digital is adding to its My Book Studio line with a new 4TB drive that features a USB 3 interface. The new unit retains the single drive form factor in 1TB, 2TB, 3TB and 4TB flavors.
The new USB 3 drives are Mac formatted out of the box for compatibility with the newest Macs that now offer USB 3 (of course, they are also backward compatible with USB 2.0). Accordingly, the new drives are compatible with Apple Time Machine and they offer 256-bit hardware-based encryption for added security against unauthorized access to the drive and its contents.
Pricewise, the My Book Studio 1TB is $159.99; the 2TB is $189.99; the 3TB is $239.99; and the 4TB is $299.99. The new drives are already available on Western Digital’s website and I expect them to show up soon at B&H Photo.
The latest bus-powered compact drives are available in capacities up to 2TB. If there’s one thing that photo and video shooters can’t get enough of, it’s storage space for the growing file sizes we’re dealing with.
The new Western Digital My Passport Studio drives for Mac users sleek and compact (particularly when you consider we’re getting 2TB of storage). WD recently sent me a pair of the new drives to try out. The drive’s external shell is mix of silver and black aluminum, which goes along nicely with the current MacBook motif.
As with with recent iterations of Western Digital’s FireWire 800 drives, the new My Passport Studio drives sport dual FW800 ports, allowing you to daisy chain multiple devices and only use a single port on your computer. [Read more…]
WD Thunderbolt Duo
Just a quick note on the WD Thunderbolt Duo that I’m putting through the paces over the next few weeks. I just took it out of the box a little while ago and ran a speed test on it with the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. [Read more…]