Drobo BeyondRAID Enclosures - Making Hard Drive Death Less Painful

Data Robotics Drobo 4-Bay USB 2.0/FireWire 800 SATA Storage Array

My Canon 40D turned me into a digital pack rat with its 10 megapixel RAW files, slowly filling up my 500GB hard drive up over the course of a year and a half. Every few weeks, I'd burn my recent photos on two sets of DVD-Rs, put them in different boxes, and rest assured that my data was reasonably safe. It was a problem, but a manageable one.

That backup strategy wasn't ready for my upgrade to a Canon 5D Mark ii a few months ago. I now have 21 megapixel RAW files that weigh in around 27MB each, and 1080P video at 300MB per minute. Not only that, but the camera can shoot in damned-near darkness, so I'm shooting in locations that were previously inaccessible. Most outings with the camera would end in a filled 16GB CF card. It didn't take too long to find myself 100 DVDs behind in my backup routine.

In comes Drobo - a multiple unit hard drive enclosure all of the benefits of traditional RAID, but without the rigidity. The Drobo houses up to four SATA drives, spreading your data across them to protect against any one of them from failing. It doesn't care if your drives are the same size or vendor, and, you can replace drives at any time with one of equal or bigger size. You can also start with two drives, and work your way up to four, if you like. The biggest drive in the cluster is used for redundancy, so if you had four 500GB drives, your total usable disk space is about 1.5GB.

Unlike RAID, the unit is data-aware, continually checking for errors. If any are detected, the green light will flash yellow next to the affected drive. If the drive is on the verge of dying, the light turns red. At this point, you can remove and replace the failing drive without turning it off, and while still using it, if you like. The Drobo takes care of assimilating the new drive into the cluster, spreading the data across it to protect from any future drive failure, completely transparent to your machine.

I still plan on continuing to burn my data to DVD-R, but have become a little more lax since buying the Drobo. To safeguard against accidental deletions, complete hardware failure, or theft, I signed up to BackBlaze.com unlimited data offsite backup. For $50/year, Backblaze's software automatically encrypts and uploads all of my data to their servers, even keeping a couple of weeks of incremental backups so that I can rollback some data to a few days ago, if needed.

I now sleep just a tad better at night.

While you're at it, I recommend you get started with two of these 1.5TB Seagate drives. If you have an extra 500GB drive laying around the house, throw it in the mix as well - it can't hurt, you can upgrade it later.

X-Rite ColorChecker Passport Color Calibration System

I just received the new X-Rite ColorChecker Passport color calibration and white balance system after growing weary of eyeballing my photos' white balance for some time now.

I recently calibrated my monitor with the Pantone huey MEU101 monitor calibrator, but still spent too much time trying to find the white balance and tint to give accurate and pleasing skin tones.

So, I broke down and ordered the ColorChecker Passport. It's $100, which is a lot, and since I've only spent a couple of hours with it, I'm not yet aware of all of the ways I can use it. But, in this two hours, I was able to find out some amazing stuff... Like... My color thus far... is awful.

The first thing I did with the ColorChecker was to take it outside and shoot it at arms' length:

This is the shot exactly as it came out of my 5d Mark II and 35mm f/1.4L, with no modifications.

I then adjusted the white balance by keying off of the neutral landscape grey square, which gave me this:

This is as far as I thought I'd have to go to get true colors. I figured, get the white balance, and use the rest of the color squares to help eyeball up my greens, blues, etc. Well, this is just the beginning. This is where I realized how little I knew about color management.

Apparently every copy of a camera and lens - and thus, combination - have different color signatures. The software can analyze a test shot containing the ColorChecker Passport, locate it within the frame, then determine the camera's response to the known colors within that environment. Doing this couldn't be easier. From Adobe Lightroom, you just export your test image through their exporter, then give the profile a name such as "Outdoors, 35mm f/1.4L before sunset". After the export is complete, you restart Lightroom, and the color profile is available for you to use for the rest of that photo shoot. The color profiles are available for use in Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop.

The results were less than subtle:


Open the three test images in separate browser tabs and flip through them. You'll notice a purplish hue in my original photo, corrected in the white balanced one. The difference between the second and third shots is mainly in the blues, purples, and greens - color responses you can't correct for with standard white balance cards.


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