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Yup! Got a little one on the way! A big thanks to my buddies who rushed out to do this last minute and filmed with their phones! #firsttry #drift #genderreveal #frs #enkeiwheels #Gt86 #dji #shotoniphone #shotonandroid (at Las Vegas, Nevada) https://www.instagram.com/p/CFvc5XSHj42/?igshid=bgf78n5y1fqp

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Happy 86 day! Woot. #frs86 #frs #gt86 (at Las Vegas, Nevada) https://www.instagram.com/p/CDjg36enP11/?igshid=1xqszubs8n5hz

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Got out to get some practice shooting some standard shots. Had to get @kurosawa.86’s #zn6 out there too! #frs #enkei #gt86gang (at Las Vegas Nevada) https://www.instagram.com/p/CDg79AaHcwc/?igshid=s37dbzvabpyz

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Plugable’s USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 to M.2 SSD enclosure has been my favorite hard drive to carry around because of its ease of use and installation, size and speed. The flexibility of being able to choose what size SSD you want inside makes this one of the best hard drive options available to photographers, videographers and anyone who needs additional fast storage.

I picked one of these up for about $79 when they first came out, now they’re down to an affordable $50 dollars on Amazon.

This is a USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 enclosure that is still backward compatible with USB-A 3.1 with the USB-C to USB-A 3.1 cable, but with USB-A you won’t be able to achieve the max speed that this enclosure is capable of — something to think about if you don’t have USB-C yet, but want to future proof your external drive.

This little thing doesn’t weigh much at all. It tips the scale at 45 grams or a bit more than an ounce and a half without a drive in it. There are only the USB-C port and a little hole that displays a blue LED that shows hard drive activity on this simple thing.

There isn’t a thing that I can directly relate the size to off the top of my head, but it’s like the size of a medium 4″ bladed pocket knife.

What to put inside one of these enclosures

You can use any brand M.2 NVME SSD in many different lengths, but I tend to stick with Samsung and their 970 series 2280 series drives due to their performance and reliability that I’ve experienced from past drives, and they’re the newest you can get. There are two options with Samsung, the more affordable EVO/EVO+ that does the job for most people and the PRO line being worth the extra money for instances where you’d be doing a lot of file transferring at the fastest rates possible.

Some other drives of note that I do like are the 1TB WD_Black and 1TB Crucial P1 or older MX500 models, which tend to be a bit more affordable at the cost of some performance. There are also budget options from companies like Sabrent.

The enclosure itself is limited to about 920MB/900MB for reads and writes per second from what I’ve tested with NVME SSD’s that are capable of reading around 3,500MB/s and writing well over 2500MB/s on a Thunderbolt 3 port (Samsung 970 PRO 512GB), and 3000MB/1000MB reads and writes on a budget SSD (Sabrent Rocket 256).

Choice of SSD does matter a bit depending on what you’re trying to use. Strangely enough, even though the drive that you purchase may exceed the enclosure’s limits, the SSD itself may perform differently in the enclosure. More on how they perform later on.

The most affordable 1TB option at the time of writing is the 1TB Crucial P1 for $97.99, so for about $150 total, you’ll get a bunch of extra space that performs much faster.

Once you have your enclosure with the included cables and an SSD, you’re basically set.

Tool-less installation of the SSD

This enclosure requires nothing else but those parts. It takes more time to unpackage the SSD and the enclosure itself than it does to plug the SSD into the enclosure and secure it with the little rubber mount. Heck, it took longer to type that last sentence than it did to install the SSD.

There’s a little switch that you hold while you slide the casing back — it’s what is pictured on the front of the box.

Once that’s open, you just slide the M.2 NVME drive into the slot and secure it using the rubber mount then reinstall the cover of the drive.

Last couple of steps

Now that it’s all buttoned-down, the last step is to format the hard drive as if it were any other drive that you’d use on the computer.

macOS tends to be pretty friendly about recognizing unformatted hard drives with a little pop-up stating that the drive hasn’t been initialized. The initializing process, or formatting, will end up occurring in Disk Utility.

Windows 10 will keep quiet. My preferred way to format any Windows drive is to use the Disk Management utility found by right-clicking the start menu.

So how does it perform?

On my 2018 MacBook Pro over USB-C/Thunderbolt 3, the enclosure did really well, but overall performance is really dependent on the SSD you put inside it.

I took my old Samsung 950 Pro and put it against a budget Sabrent Rocket, both in the 250GB/256GB variant. These drives were formatted and then tested for sequential reads and write speeds with a quick Blackmagic Speed Test.

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Samsung 850 PRO Speeds over USB-C

Sabrent Rocket Speeds over USB-C

While this doesn’t show how the drive will actually perform in real-world use, it does indicate a bit of the speed differences that transferring large files may incur. Overall, both SSDs in this enclosure perform extremely quick for real-world use. Both drives in the enclosure are definitely faster than any SATA SSD paired with an enclosure.

USB-C and USB-A flexibility sure as heck help out, but once you drop down to USB-A, speeds drop to around the 540MB/500MB sequential read and write speeds.

Consider getting one of these

There is a premium for purchasing an M.2 NVME drive, but this is the future of fast, upgradable, portable storage and it can be extremely beneficial. I can imagine the investment for an ultraportable 2TB portable drive would be initially hefty, but it sure beats the heck out of slow 2TB rotational drives and will buy back time for sure.

Make your own extremely fast and portable SSD hard drive Plugable's USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 to M.2 SSD enclosure has been my favorite hard drive to carry around because of its ease of use and installation, size and speed.

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Exporting a Live Photo from an iPhone as GIF in Photos for Mac

Exporting a Live Photo from an iPhone as GIF in Photos for Mac

With Apple’s Live Photos built into iPhones 6S and above, millions of people have been sharing animated images to each other across the Messages app.

There is one thing to know though, not very many apps recognize Apple’s Live Photos format, making it a bit harder to share to other accounts and people.

These are cool little animated images that just bounce back and forth, like this old one of me…

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Did Adobe actually add functional multicore support for Lightroom Classic?

Did Adobe actually add functional multicore support for Lightroom Classic?

So here I am at 11 p.m. organizing some images after upgrading my Lightroom Classic to 8.3, and I see on the top of my Mac’s menu bar a giant block of blue. You see, I’m running a little tool called iStat Menu, a hardware monitoring tool that shows nerds, like myself, temperatures, CPU activity, Read/write speeds and so forth. On that wonderful menu bar, I see all 20 threads of my Mac Pro’s…

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Samsung had released the 860 QVO SSD line in the end of 2018 as their entry level and most affordable SSD. Samsung has been a leader of solid state storage for almost a decade and has brought much of that technology down to a price range that everyone should jump on. I’ve got my hands on the 1TB model, the lowest capacity that Samsung makes alongside a 2TB and 4TB model.

The QVO is currently only available with the SATA III interface, and I haven’t heard of any plans to make it available in other interfaces, but I’d imagine that there would be a M.2 variant at some point down the line. The SATA interface makes it the most widely adaptable across the world, as most computers still utilize that interface and it is easily adaptable to USB to be used as an external hard drive.

For this little test review, I’ve used an affordable Sabrent USB 3.0 to 2.5″ SATA adapter (roughly $9) along with the Samsung 1TB 860 QVO and the 1TB Samsung 860 PRO connected to my 2013 Mac Pro over USB 3.0.

Benchmarking

I used CrystalDiskMark or AmorphousDiskMark (basically runs CrystalDiskMark on a Mac) to run a benchmark on a couple different size files to help show any differences based off of a certain capacity or specification. The biggest difference with the QVO and the PRO is the amount of cache that each contains, with the PRO model having more. You’ll be able to see the difference in longer sustained writes to the drives (but really, if you have any sort of traditional hard drive, and you get a QVO, it’ll be exponentially faster anyway).

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These drives are being limited by the USB bus on my system (there are a lot of other things running at the same time, but this makes the test reflect a little bit more of the real world scenario). When used internally, the speed will more than likely jump upward toward 500MB/s and higher for both sequential reading and writing.

Traditional hard drives will transfer exceedingly slow in comparison. Just as a comparison, I’ve tested a 2.5″ WD Black 500GB 7200RPM Performance hard drive for laptops (one that is better than typical external hard drives you can purchase off the shelf) just to give you an idea as to what one of the best traditional hard drives can do…

It is almost too easy to compare the numbers. The numbers can’t accurately reflect how fast your computer will load, but it’ll give you an idea that it’ll be BLAZING fast if you’re upgrading from one of these drives. Once you’ve used a machine with a SSD installed internally, it’s really hard to go back to anything that has a traditional hard drive.

Most of the transactions that occur when booting a computer or starting up an app works around the 4K size– so you might even have a computer that is up to 130x faster than what you would have with a laptop or desktop with a traditional drive.

  Best uses for this Samsung 860 QVO drive

Working Lightroom Catalog storage

This drive is a good candidate for to be used as an external hard drive when paired one of those Sabrent USB adapters like the one I used for the benchmark. Putting the Lightroom Catalog and associated photos on one of these drives can really help with speeding up access to the pictures in Lightroom. It’ll also make it easier for you to tote around and open your catalogs on different computers. Since it doesn’t have any moving parts, it won’t suffer the same death and corruption that most external hard drives encounter due to drops and vibration — that doesn’t make it invincible though, so please have a good backup system in place (or just get another QVO just for backups!)

Internal use

Because of the low cost for this drive and more than adequate performance, one could utilize this as a primary replacement drive for their laptop or desktop, as long as the computer currently utilizes a SATA interface.

While the drive is backwards compatible with SATA II and SATA I, it’ll perform as intended speed over SATA III allowing the computer to get close to that ~550MB/s ceiling.

The roomy 1TB can hold just about everything that most people need on their main drives — and if you opt for the 2TB or 4TB, you’re probably not going to need anything else for quite a long time! I’ve lived off of 1TB on my main drive and haven’t come close to the max (I do have a Drobo to hold all my media though).

This is what I’d recommend the most. I’ve put at least 200 Samsung 860 PRO SSDs into laptops and have upgraded 25% of those into larger QVO drives have heard that they haven’t noticed anything distinctly different — and they’re using the machines for video rendering and 3D modeling. If it is good enough for their intense use; it’s probably more than enough for us photographers and videographers.

Video storage

If you’ve shot any sort of video, you know that it takes up a lot of space — and often times, some of these 20GB video files can take an eternity to transfer. Storing your videos on one or several of these drives would be a wonderful solution. I’d definitely opt for a couple of the larger drives and still retain a good backup methodology.

Where to pick one up

Grab the Samsung 860 QVO 1TB for $117.99. I have paid as low as $107 for this model, but I’ve seen it as high as $122. The price seems to fluctuate quite a bit, but it is still the most affordable for the performance.

Grab the Samsung 860 QVO 4TB $547.99. I have seen these come and go on Amazon, but B&H seems to have a steady stock of these.

Grab the Samsung 860 QVO 1TB and the Sabrent USB 3.0 (5Gbps) adapter bundle for $126.98 on Amazon.

Getting Samsung’s 860 QVO solid state hard drive is a no brainer Samsung had released the 860 QVO SSD line in the end of 2018 as their entry level and most affordable SSD.

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What resolution monitor should you buy as a photographer — 1080p or 4K?

What resolution monitor should you buy as a photographer — 1080p or 4K?

When it comes to monitor resolutions, there are really two monikers that are being thrown around today — 1080p and 4K. While 1080p screens look good for monitors that are smaller than 27″, 4K tends to be what is recommended by the local Best Buy salesperson if you want a high resolution screen that is 27″ or larger. I can’t explain exactly why, but if I were to take a guess, I’d say it’s because…

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The photography business management software you didn't know you needed

The photography business management software you didn’t know you needed

I’m a pretty spontaneous guy and already am easily distracted by shiny, expensive objects, so when it comes to focusing on the logistics of running the photo business, I kind of freak out and forget some things — but did I need something to help out with that? I’ve always wanted something, I just didn’t know that I needed it though.

There are plans for shoots, changes to shoots, more shoots to…

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Photoshop CC 2018/2019 and macOS Mojave 10.14: Black artifacts

Photoshop CC 2018/2019 and macOS Mojave 10.14: Black artifacts

One can probably imagine the amount of annoyance felt when unwanted black freckles show up on an image you’re cleaning up. Not very long ago, I smashed more than three dollars worth of Hi-Chews in my hand out of sheer frustration over a bug known in Adobe’s Photoshop CC 2018 and 2019. Sadly, it was unknown to me, but known to Adobe.

Adobe has the bug aptly named, “Black artifacts on image after…

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Why switch from Apple Photos to Adobe Lightroom?

Why switch from Apple Photos to Adobe Lightroom?

If I didn’t know much about photography and just wanted photos to easily sync up with my Mac and all my iOS devices all while being able to lightly edit photos, Apple Photos would be a grand piece of software. The option for iCloud Photo Library within the Photos app makes it super easy and hassle-free to have your photos synchronized to a remote server (iCloud), and consequently other Macs,…

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JPEGmini Pro comes to Capture One 12

JPEGmini Pro comes to Capture One 12

I’ve been a long time user of JPEGmini Pro, which helps shrink down JPEG file sizes to help save space and decrease website loading times while still retaining image quality.

I’ve used it in my workflow with their Lightroom plug-in to produce images to clients and update my website via Lightroom Presets. Capture One users though, had to first export their images to a location on the hard drive,…

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Get your camera body's sensor cleaned and checked for free at WPPI

Get your camera body’s sensor cleaned and checked for free at WPPI

Dust. It’s annoying to clean off the shelves you have, but it’s even more annoying to clean your own sensor. There are kits and tools to make it easier, although there isn’t anything easier than handing your camera over to someone who works for your camera manufacturer — better yet, it is free if you’re attending WPPI.

I’d check with your manufacturer to see if they’ve got a presence at WPPI…

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eGPU: Why you should or shouldn’t get one

eGPU: Why you should or shouldn’t get one

eGPU’s, external graphics cards connected over the relatively new Thunderbolt 3 connection, are fascinating pieces of hardware that enable Thunderbolt 3 equipped laptops to use high performance desktop graphic cards. With an entry price point of around $400 for a plug and play system for both Mac and PC, you might want to see if it’s worth the money for your laptop.

These devices range in sizes…

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Oben CTM-2500 5-Section Carbon Fiber Monopod

Oben CTM-2500 5-Section Carbon Fiber Monopod

Anything carbon fiber is freakin awesome and this Oben CTM-2500 5-Section Carbon Fiber Monopod is no exception to that. If anyone is looking for a super lightweight, durable and sturdy stick to either hold your camera up, hold your lens up, hold you up or bring someone down, this is one to consider.

Sports and wildlife photographers that need the convenience of mobility over a tripod will enjoy…

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Moving from Apple Photos in macOS Mojave 10.14 to Lightroom Classic CC

Moving from Apple Photos in macOS Mojave 10.14 to Lightroom Classic CC

Apple’s updated Photos app in Mojave included some very helpful features for those in their ecosystem, but still not enough for me to keep using Apple Photos over Lightroom Classic CC. In this post, we will show you a quick and dirty way to move your photos from Apple Photos to Lightroom Classic CC.

For those of you who own a 2008-2011 Mac and haven’t been able to update your Mac OS to Mojave,…

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Okay, so here’s the deal. You know that little lock switch on the side of the SD card? The one that you move to lock the card from being written on? Well, it works. It works really well. Almost too well on some occasions — like when that little lock switch becomes loose or even worse, missing!

My wonderful Lexar Professional 64GB UHS-II 2000x Gold card ended up having one that was loose. Every time I plugged it into my Fujifilm X-T2, no matter how carefully I placed it in there with the card unlocked, the switch would slide to lock! It turns out that these switches may become loose after a whole lot of usual use. I deem it wear and tear. But still…

It was beginning to irk me. I was irked.

This card was a special one to me. It is the fastest card and the largest capacity card I own.

So, to attempt to fix it:

First, split the card apart.

Second, panic as the microscopic switch flies out someplace.

Third, scramble and scour the table and the floor.

Crap.

Well, if you didn’t know, losing that little switch there makes every camera and card reader/writer think that the card is locked. Fully unusable. A wonderful read-only memory time-capsule. A permanent backup.

Solution 1

The cameras and readers actually have a little feeler that checks to see if the card is unlocked. You can fool it, by placing a tiny piece of tape right over where the switch used to be.

Talk about a MacGyver solution.

It works, until the tape gets stuck — which may happen to you as it did for me. The problem is that the tape adds to the thickness, and not all cameras have the same height tolerance for the SD card.

Solution 2

After forgetting that I placed the memory-card-of-utter-frustration into my little tech junk drawer, I remembered that I had a bunch of other memory cards and an abundance of microSD card adapters. I figured that one of those could become a donor!

And this was my solution.

I tried one donor card at a time, cracking the card open by inserting a small pocket knife or tiny flathead screwdriver into the little slot next to the switch and twisting ever so gently to separate the card just enough to remove the switch.

Once you have the switch, crack open your original card and place the switch in there with some tweezers.

Now, one would think that the same brands would use the same switches and you may have already got the hint that I had to crack open several of them before finding one that would look like it would fit. My donor for this Lexar came from a Kingston branded microSD card adapter — but even Kingston branded microSD card adapters have different switches.

I had to make make a modification to the switch that would appear to fit correctly (I had to cut off some little nubs with the aforementioned pocket knife), before cracking the card open once more and placing the switch into the slot.

Overall, it worked! The switch is harder to move (which is perfect), and all my cameras and readers can read it without having to pull tape out from the slot!

I just saved this $100 SD card from being unusable Okay, so here's the deal. You know that little lock switch on the side of the…