Category Archives: Photography

Hardware of the Year

Hardware

A cornucopia of choices.

On the camera front this year choices, with one exception, have been modestly incremental. The flapping mirror DSLR is at the end of its life, obsoleted by electronic viewfinders, and will struggle on for a few more years in the hands of a few professional users who have yet to fully amortize their capital investment. Meanwhile, EVFs move to strength in the likes of the Sony NEX-7 and, of course, in the Panasonic G3 and GH1. All that’s needed to speed the demise of the clunky, bulky DSLR is a professional grade APS-C or MFT body and maybe a few faster lenses. Responsiveness will only improve, and the G3 has shown that autofocus is now as fast or faster with modern technologies than that offered in traditional bodies.

After an interminable wait, I finally got my G3 body, and while it compromises handling in the interest of an even smaller size, the sensor is two stops better than the one in the G1, and once the improved and more compact PZ kit lens arrives – back ordered for months now – the G1 and its excellent kit lens will move on. The sensor is now so good that I need nothing better. As I can reliably make perfect 18″ x 24″ prints from the G3’s files, I have no need for more pixels. Focusing speed is outstanding and while there are a few ergonomic quibbles, the overall package is a street snapper’s dream. Those needing more sophisticated movie functions will opt for the costlier GH2 body, with a similar sensor and better handling. The G3 + kit lens at $600 make a compelling case for junking all that bulky old gear. You know, that kit you increasingly leave behind because photography is meant to be fun, not a sore shoulder and bad back. 2012 may well see a pro-grade GH3 added to the mix. The MFT lens range is already vast with something for most tastes from several makers.

Hair replacement. Market Street, SF. G3, kit lens @16mm, 1/2500, f/5.6, ISO320.

The day when we will see a true modern version of the rangefinder Leica is now very close. Panny offers the operational speed, Sony the best EVF in the business, Fuji in its X100 and X10 has the form factor right, and lenses are getting smaller and lighter daily. With all this gear offering full automation the street snapper has never been better served.

The other incremental improvement in camera gear this year has been the addition of the splendid Sony lens to the latest iPhone, the 4S, along with much improved response times. While any cell phone is a handling disaster, owing to its form factor, the 4S really makes decent print sizes possible, and has a simple and practical UI. If only Apple would make a real camera the world would open its wallet. It’s a $20bn revenue opportunity waiting to capitalize on the sloth of Canon and Nikon, neither with any credible innovation or thinking to entice the more demanding user. I have 13″ x 19″ prints on the wall here made from the 4S and while the snaps were made in ideal lighting conditions, the very fact that a decent sized print can be made is a revelation, given how compact the camera is. And it even makes phone calls!

But by a considerable margin, my award for Hardware of the Year goes to Intel and its superb line of Sandy Bridge CPUs.

These come in many flavors at various prices, from the bottom of the line i3 2100 at $115, to the top of the line i7 2600K at $320. In 2012 the enhanced Ivy Bridge range will bring higher speeds yet still using the same socket, dictating but a BIOS update to work on your existing motherboard. All come with built in graphics, with select i3 and all i5 and i7 models including the better quality Intel Graphics 3000 GPU, so that the computer builder does not even have to use a separate graphics card. Power consumption is way down from the predecessor Core2Duo/Extreme/Quad lines, the prices continue to drop and the performance is significantly improved in all respects. For the novice computer builder, be it Windows or OS X or Linux, the only thing to fear is fear itself, with an abundance of excellent help sites on the web to speed your construction. Even hacking PC hardware to run OS X is now at the point where it’s almost trivial, and the alternatives simply do not solve. You can buy a pre-assembled piece of garbage from Dell or HP, or a piece of short-lived poorly designed but beautifully executed jewelry from Apple in the guise of an iMac, but given that any photographer today spends more time in front of a computer display than behind a camera, why not enjoy the best and build your own? Intel has never made it simpler, with their ‘K’ CPU models warranted for overclocking, so with a couple of key strokes the builder can increase CPU speed by 20-40%. Incremental cost? $zero.

I upgraded my three display HackPro stalwart from a Core2Quad to a Core i5-2500K, overclocked a modest 21%, and am enjoying response and video framing rates nothing short of astounding. Memory speed with the latest RAM sticks is twice that of the predecessor, with some 16gB running a mere $70. You can view the results by clicking Links->Videos on this site. So enthused was I by the price:performance equation, that I junked my old Intel Atom-powered stock quotes Hack and replaced it with an inexpensive i3 2100 machine, with a speedy Nvidia GT430 GPU, and two inexpensive 1920×1080 displays. Why, and the US taxpayer subsidized me for half the cost, the lot being a deductible business expense.

And finally, I replaced one of the worst pieces of hardware I have ever used, the late-2009 MacMini, with a HackMini, also using the i3 and the same GPU as a movie server and home theater PC. I have never been happier. Movies are ripped/compressed with no stress, there is a total absence of all those start up errors the Mini came with as stock, it does not overheat, and the DVD player is a real machine with an extending tray, not the terminally doomed slot-loading excrescence in the Mini. Yes, Virginia, consumers still watch DVDs, much as Apple would tell you otherwise. My gift-to-self this Christmas is a 35 DVD box of Clint Eastwood’s Warner Brothers movies, for the grand sum of $77 from Amazon. These will be ripped and stored to my server boxes in no time and watching them will come without all those offensive commercials modern DVDs include. Go ahead, make my day. And “I’m paying for this microphone, Mr. Chairman”, as a one time presidential candidate remarked. Don’t ask me to pay to watch your advertising. Finally, the Hack Mini has USB sockets and a card reader where you can actually access them – on the front – nor hidden away among the mess of cables and spider webs in the MacMini.

Reliability of these machines? All are on 7/24 and the only time I restart is when an application upgrade dictates that be done. All run OS X Lion.

Do yourself a big favor. Junk your desktop and replace it with something bespoke which you have built yourself. If you get really stuck, ask your 9 year old to do the assembly.

Sony NEX-7

Hardware

An interesting development.

When a reader pointed the new Sony NEX-7 out to me I brushed it off with the rebuff that cameras without proper viewfinders hold no interest for me. Yes, I use an iPhone 4S which lacks one, but that’s hardly for ‘serious’ snapping. It’s all I can do to hold that gadget when taking a snap without dropping it.

Well, I was wrong. Not only does the flood-delayed NEX-7, when it emerges from Thailand, have a viewfinder, it’s a high pixel density EVF, on paper an improvement over the one in the Panny G3 and GH2. And Sony has dropped the ridiculous prism ‘bump’ which Panny insists on including in its DSLRs.

From pictures it’s a little hard to reconcile the seemingly gargantuan lenses, mostly in garish, shiny chrome, with the small body, and the alternative of using adapted Leica M optics is simply not an alternative. No auto focus and silly prices make it so.

But it’s an interesting entry from Sony and one which boasts a high megapixel sensor. If responsiveness and the UI are half decent, it will be a meaningful entry into the APS-C marketplace. However, at $1200 for the body + kit lens, I doubt Panasonic is losing any sleep over it.

Seemingly gargantuan kit lens in place.

Saving Sammy’s best

Hardware

A quick fix for a dead HDD.

A new Samsung HE103UJ 1tB disk drive runs some $240, a great deal more than the $120 I paid for mine, the immediately previous generation HD103UH with the same specs – 32mB cache, 7200 rpm, 3mb/s SATAII data transfer rate. At that replacement cost I reckoned there was no downside to taking it apart and seeing if something obvious was the cause. The drive would not be recognized by OS X’s Finder but would pop up in Disk Utility. However, Disk Utility could neither repair or erase the drive, those options remaining greyed out.

Yes, there are cheaper drives out there, but as a reader commented on yesterday’s column, recent drive failure rates seem to be skyrocketing. The Sammy is a known, high quality drive, mine being 3.5 years old. I own a dozen of these 1tB drives and this is the first to fail. Most have over 3 years’ use, often 7/24.

The controller board on the back of these is retained with five T8 Torx screws and I had it off in a couple of minutes. It makes contact with the drive’s innards in two areas – a multi-contact connector and a two point one – both circled below:

Even to the naked eye it was obvious that the multi-contact connector was heavily oxidized, though there were no signs of heat damage anywhere on the board and the drive neither overheated or made strange noises which would suggest mechanical issues. A couple of seconds cleaning the contacts with my son’s school eraser, the board was replaced and guess what?

Yup, Disk Utility erased and formatted the drive immediately and the Repair function found no errors. The drive also now appeared in Finder.

Sammy must have sold millions of these and they have a deservedly great reputation, so before applying a sledgehammer to your blown one, as long as the heads are not clicking like mad, the bearing is not screaming and it can still be seen in Disk Utility, try this quick fix. I checked a couple of other 3.5″ SATA drives from other makers and the mechanics seem much the same, with the controller board attached with a few screws.

Big Storage

Hardware

Spinning discs rule – if only just.

First, a few words about large traditional spinning disk (HDD) external drive enclosures. These are still the cheapest way to store large amounts of data. The recent floods in Thailand, which accounts for one third of global drive manufacturing, have increased prices from as low as 9 cents/gB to maybe 11 cents/gB for the slower drives, but that still puts SSDs to shame, with prices around $3/gB, or 25x as much. And SSD capacities are atill low. A 1tB Western Digital Caviar Green HDD runs some $130 today.

My rule is that if you buy a single traditional HDD for storage you are playing with fire. Drives simply must be duplicated as one or the other will eventually fail. A device whose multiple platters spin at a minimum of 5,400rpm – that’s 2.84 billion revolutions a year if left on – and whose data heads fly back and forth at insane speeds, is a modern miracle which works awfully hard. So matched pairs it is. Further, I don’t buy ‘passive cooling’ arguments, where fins are claimed to conduct heat away. Nope, if it doesn’t have a fan I’m not interested. And finally, I don’t trust RAID. A simple copy works for me, not yet more technology waiting to go wrong. I use Carbon Copy Cloner for automated overnight backups so that there’s nothing to forget.

When one of my OWC/MacSales enclosures recently failed, just out of warranty (naturally), a failure that was the driver for yesterday’s column, I ordered a like replacement from OWC. These are not cheap at $120 each but they are well made, beautifully finished in unpainted aluminum and as only one of the five I have owned for years had failed I didn’t particularly want to explore alternatives. But OWC has changed the design and the latest variant which ships without drives has deleted the internal dip switches which permitted setting the box to recognize the two drives inside as individual devices. The current version permits RAID only. Back it went. OWC told me they only sell these with pre-installed HDDs of their make of choice for individual drive setups, as some makers’ drives are too temperamental to be thus recognized. I had two good drives, so an empty enclosure was what I required.

So I shopped around for a dual drive, fan cooled enclosure, which permitted the two drives to be recognized as separate devices, and settled a tad reluctantly on the Vantec NexStar MX. The low price was troubling – just $45 from Amazon USA. Further, the Amazon reviews complained about the fan noise but I reckoned at that price there was little to lose. Well, it turns out this is a fine enclosure. While it comes in black only, the drive mounting scheme is far superior to the fiddly cables used by OWC. The drives simply slide in, there are no cables, and each is retained with the screws provided. Four more small Philips screws hold the enclosure together and you are in business. The enclosure is beautifully made, requiring no excuses. This is USB2 only, so high data transfer rates will not happen here, but for mass storage of photographs or movies, these are just the ticket. The drive enclosure is 12 feet away from where I work so fan noise is not an issue. If it is you could probably hack away the grille to reduce it or reduce the fan speed as one Amazon reviewer did. He soldered a 120 ohm resistor in series with the power supply cable to the fan. The trade off is that the enclosure will run hotter.

There’s a green power light and a blue LED for each HDD to denote activity.

Rear view. The stand need not be used in practice and is removable.

The drives simply slide in. No cables required.

The manual specifically states that the capacity is 2 x 1tB HDDs. Amazon reviewers suggest that 2 x 1.5tB is possible although new drivers may have to be installed. I don’t know if this enclosure will support larger drives. I doubt it. So if you are happy with two 1tB HDDs, this is fine. Anything larger, do your research first. 2tB drives currnetly offer the lowest data storage cost per byte. I rather suspect that if you partition these into two 1tB partitions they will work fine, as I am guessing that the enclosure’s drive controller chip is choking at anything larger than a 1tB partition, but I do not know. Finally, this enclosure will not support the higher data transfer rates offered by the latest SATAIII HDDs. It supports SATAI and II only. If you can live with those limitations it’s a fine and inexpensive solution for large volume data storage needs.

Disk Drill

Software

Drills deep. Works, too.

The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley

Robert Burns

Update January 1, 2023:

Disa Drill is very much NOT recommended if you are on an older version of OS X – I’m on High Sierra 10.13 – as it will not run and the latest version requires an OS update which many older Macs will not support. You can read the whole sad story here which provides an excellent alternative which works.

* * * * *

You don’t need to be a long dead Scottish poet to know that disk drives are like motorcyclists. There are those who have crashed, and those who will. And while those of the two wheeled persuasion can only hope for the best, users of the other population can do an awful lot to avoid serious injury by backing up. Onsite and offsite. On portable drives, flash drives, in the cloud, you name it. The choices have never been greater or the cost of this essential insurance lower.

Like all those who have learned the hard way, backing up is second nature to my use of computers. The thought of losing a lifetime’s pictures is not one I want to think about.

When it comes to movies on my large capacity fan cooled enclosures, each accommodates two 1tB hard drives, main and backup. These devices enjoy an easy life and after some five years’ use none of the 10 1tB Samsung HDDs has yet failed. Yet, the other day, I was nastily reminded of the dangers of complacency. As I turned one of the drive enclosures on it replied with an ominous clicking sound. The drives refused to mount (meaning they did not appear in Finder in OS Lion) and the drive head could be heard flying back and forth, hunting hopelessly. A moment later the box was apart and one of the drives mounted in that handy Aluratek external USB drive cradle. Same result, with the drive refusing to appear in Finder. So I fired up Disk Utility, and the drive was there, confirming what I suspected. The drive was fine, making no untoward sounds and not overheating, but the file directory on it was trashed. I went back to the enclosure and confirmed that other drives exhibited the same clicking symptoms, confirming that the circuitry in the enclosure was shot and had taken the directories on both movie drives with it.

Data storage on hard drives only seems like magic. A directory points to files just like an index in a book (remember books? Made from rain forests, they were an affectation of the last 600 years, now largely ended). Lose the directory and the files may still be there, but the operating system does not know where to look. Indeed, when you ‘erase’ a drive all you are doing is erasing the directory. To erase every sector takes ages and extra effort – just try that using ‘Securely erase trash” on your Mac someday.

If you go to the Paso Robles public library in lovely central coastal California’s wine country, you will find it exceptionally well stocked with classic movie DVDs. Those are the result of my gift after all were ripped and saved to hard drives. I have not owned a DVD in ages, and fail to understand how any DVD collection can be easily accessed with traditional physical storage. Plus, a bunch of drives takes up a lot less space. At an average uncompressed file size of 5gB that makes for 200 movies on a 1tB HDD, so the prospect of reacquiring 200 ‘lost’ movies and re-ripping them was not one I wanted to think about. I hunted around for disk recovery software and found myself in a mine field. Most of the applications out there come in a free download test version, allowing a disk scan to be performed but prohibiting saving of any files ‘discovered’ until you pony up for the app. Fair enough, but some of these vendors are asking $1,000 or more to capitalize on human misery. Reminds me of American health care. Worse, the level of English in many of these apps, which look suspiciously similar, suggests Eastern European provenance, a heritage more associated with software theft than file recovery. No thanks.

First I tried the Big Name file recovery app (I won’t name it here) and found yet again that it is useless. I cannot recall this app having ever done anything for me other than debiting my bank account. I looked at many other apps and settled on two to test, primarily judging on the strength of their user manuals. The more technical and detailed, the better I felt. I did the so called ‘deep scans’ on my disk, which typically take 8-10 hours (!) with the first app ($1,000) finding 40 movies, the second ($195) finding 35. Simply not good enough, and the UIs of these apps were shockingly bad – like using Windows. No meaningful progress indicators and one conked out after 8+ hours of grinding away. At least I didn’t get a blue screen. So I put the drive aside for a few weeks to allow me to do more research. Then, the other day, I was idling through the AppStore (as big and as poorly indexed a mess as iTunes) and came across Disk Drill in the Utilities section. It too offers a ‘deep scan’ option whereby the trashed directory is bypassed and the beginnings and ends of files are determined and temporarily indexed. That index then acts as a reference base for the recovery step.

Disk Drill has no detailed manual, nor is any needed, as there’s an excellent tutorial when you start the app and the maker has a fine site, written in clear grammatically correct English, complete with a forum and evidencing a very professional approach. Good English may not make for good apps, but I have rarely known bad English associated with good code. If you can’t spell, why should I think you can code?.

Well, guess what? On its 9 hour deep scan Disk Drill found all 202 files. The lot! The whole megillah. And the progress reporting is meaningful and outstanding, showing file by file detail as files are located and updating a running percentage and time remaining indicator.

The deep scan under way. VOB files are reported as ‘mpg’ which is what they really are. However, they are mercifully not Quicktime files!

Some of the file sizes looked awry, being way too large, but this looked encouraging. I decided to buy the app, which is discounted on the AppStore for $30 right now, but I went directly to the vendor’s site for the $90 Pro version. That puts more money in the developer’s pocket, requiring no payola to greedy Apple, and offers one additional key feature of which more below.

At the conclusion of the deep scan I formatted the backup drive and inserted it in a separate cradle – you don’t want to try writing recovered files back to the source drive! This is what I now saw – the funky large files had disappeared and all 202 movies were pointed to the backup drive to be retrieved and saved. Before starting the restore, I unchecked the original files found, the ones with the odd sizes under the ‘Video’ directory, leaving just the original movie files, as I knew them on my drive, checked. I suspect that the original scan is combining more than one movie file in arriving at the large file sizes, whereas the recovery choices do it right, segregating these into their component parts.

Ready to recover and save.

The scan results can be saved so that the recovery process, which can be time consuming, can be restarted later. If you have just the one Mac available that may be good idea. Run recovery at night when your machine is otherwise idle.

Amazingly, even the original directory structure had been recreated, suggesting that, as in a book, not only does the directory point to the files, but unlike in tomes of old, the files also have pointers to the directory. That’s significant as it obviates a large amount of labor in not having to recreate the original directory structure. Without this structure finding anything is virtually impossible.

I started the retrieval and save process and the app said it would take 17 hours. Heck, it would take weeks to re-rerip those movies to say nothing of the capital and opportunity costs, as I like to think that my time is still worth something! In the above snap you can see the results of the deep scan at the bottom of the screenshot where every file shows recovery possibilities as only ‘average’ – the list being Excellent, Good, Average and Poor. Not that encouraging, but I paid up, entered the registration information and started the recovery process, fingers crossed. This is what I saw a few hours later:

Well into the recovery process. The files are properly identified and broken into constituent parts.

Recovery completed.

I hopped into the restore drive, tried a few of the movies and each played perfectly, with no beginning or ending glitches. The movies were back in business. The faulty OWC dual drive enclosure was recycled, being well out of warranty, and as they only make empty enclosures now with RAID, and as I prefer simple dual drives as I do not understand RAID technology well enough to trust it, I switched to an inexpensive Vantec which has the two attributes I seek. Drives can be set up to be seen as individual disks by OS X and there’s a fan to keep things cool. And at half the price of the OWC drive, what’s not to like? Despite customer comments at Amazon, I have not found the fan noise objectionable. Then again, I don’t sit 2 feet from the enclosure.

Why the Pro version of the software? Because it comes with a feature named Recovery Vault and I’ll let Cleverfiles explain, quoting from their web site:

Why is Recovery Vault important?

To be short: recovery vault is the technology that helps you prevent data losses on HFS/HFS+ and FAT disks/partitions.

Why?

Unlike other file systems, HFS and HFS+ developed by Apple don’t have an effective way to restore deleted data. Once the data is gone, the only way to recover it is binary reading of hard drive sectors. While this is exactly what recovery algorithms in Disk Drill do, as a result you can only recover the file itself, but all its properties are gone: no original filename, no location, etc. However, the original names of the files you deleted may be the main criteria to identify your data without reading the contents. So losing this info may be crucial. Recovery vault addresses exactly this issue and helps you recover everything in HFS/HFS+ partitions exactly as it was there before.

How?

Recovery vault by CleverFiles is an integral part of Disk Drill. You may enable this technology on per-disk/per-partition basis. Disks and partitions protected with recovery vault will be monitored by the special background service of Disk Drill for data changes. When something’s deleted, recovery vault remembers all the original properties of the deleted items and makes it possible to easily recover this data later on.

Important!

Recovery vault is not a panacea, while it makes data recovery algorithms much more effective, it doesn’t provide you with 100% guarantee that ANYTHING can be recovered ANY TIME in future. Internal Mac OS algorithms extremely complex, and nobody knows or can predict when certain data is overwritten by the file system drivers.

Think of Recovery vault as a second file directory separate from the regular one, residing on the protected data disk.. It’s a nice feature and I’m installing it on all my drives.

In the following example, I have switched Recovery vault on for one of the two SSDs (SSD Bak) in my computer:

Disk drive SSD Bak in the process of being enabled for Recovery vault.

SSD Bak enabled for Recovery vault, denoted by the blue shield icon.
This took some 20 minutes on the 120gB 3gb/s SATA2 SSD.

The 170mB file created by Disk Drill resides – as a hidden file – in the root directory of the protected drive, thus:

Invisible file – exposed here – for Recovery vault on SSD Bak.

That’s a very modest overhead for the benefit gained.

I have not turned on Guaranteed Recovery as I also use a TimeMachine backup – not shown above – for versioned backups of all my drives.

Cleverfiles says that their app works for a broad variety of storage media, including flash drives, iPods, and so on. I have not tested that (and am in no hurry to do so!) but my excellent experience with this large recovery project described here makes be believe them. A great product and one to have in your armory to plan for that inevitable day all motorcyclists expect. Unlike everything else I tried it works and is reasonably priced.

Meanwhile, I’m pleased to report that my 200 ‘lost’ movie files are back online, and that I am celebrating with Frankenheimer’s 1966 classic ‘Grand Prix’ made when men died at the wheel, computers and aerodynamics were unknown and mechanical engineers ruled the world of motor racing. Great days. (OK, not the dying bit).

Update December 15, 2011:

In the spirit of full disclosure, after I paid for the app, used it and and wrote the above, the maker contacted me with a free offer of lifetime upgrades. As I wrote this well before that event, which accordingly could not color my assessment, I was pleased to accept their offer and reproduce the related email thread below: