Maggie McFee – Whinging on the Internet since 1994

And read it!: “180 Degree Shutter – Learn It, Live It, Love It”

// January 4th, 2010 // Comments Off on And read it!: “180 Degree Shutter – Learn It, Live It, Love It” // Raves, tech

I just want to point you to this great post by Tyler Ginter., Worth your time if you’re interested in cameras and film.
180 Degree Shutter – Learn It, Live It, Love It

Tyler, for those who don’t know him, is a “Combat Camera Platoon Leader in charge of a team of videographers and photographers who travel the world gathering historical footage for the U.S. Army”. And he’s a great guy who’s always sharing both his creations and his time. Kudos, Tyler.

Disk Test Results Round 1

// July 11th, 2008 // Comments Off on Disk Test Results Round 1 // Raves, Represent, tech

And the winner is… well, that depends on what you’re looking for in a 1TB drive. The clear, overall winner was the Seagate ST31000340NS. It won in overall speed and in sheer ‘clockwork-like’ consistency. But hot on its heels was the Samsung Spinpoint F1 RAID. Not only is this drive cheaper and still ‘enterprise grade’, it also has a consumer-level sibling with nearly identical specs for around $170! That spells bargain, to me.

Have a look at the numbers yourself here: DiskTestResults.pdf
(For more info on what and why, see this post)

I should give special props to the Western Digital ‘Green Power’ drive. It’s not going to win any speed contests, but this drive does draw significantly less power _and_ it runs cooler than the average drive. I tested one in a NAS full of Seagates and the WD drive consistently ran 10 degrees cooler! Take that, Al Gore!

And stay tuned for more shootout between the Seagate and Samsung next week. I’ll be testing a 4 drive conifguration in both internal bays of the Mac Pro as well as using e-SATA via a RocketRaid 2314 controller. And… maybe more if I’m not knackered!

For now… enjoy the weekend, peeps!

UPDATE: For those interested in pricing on the drives as mentioned, here are links from my “go to” drive suppliers for both the enterprise and consumer models of the top two:

Seagate ST31000340NS (~ $270)
Seagate ST31000340AS (~ $215)
Samsung HE103UJ (~ $238)
Samsung HD103UJ (~ $168)

Drive Testing Has Begun

// July 10th, 2008 // Comments Off on Drive Testing Has Begun // Rambling, Raves, tech

I’ve started the drive tests I wrote about earlier ( read here ).

I’ll be posting the results here in two batches as they’re completed:
1st batch will have results for all 4 models in the single disk and 3@RAID0 tests.
2nd batch will have results for the top two performers in additional configurations (4 disks and E-SATA).

The drives being tested are:
Western Digital WD10EACS Caviar GP
Seagate ST31000340NS Barracuda ES.2
Hitachi 0A35772 Ultrastar A7K1000
Samsung HE103UJ Spinpoint F1 RAID
(all are ‘enterprise’ class 1TB SATAII drives)

Stay tuned!