Reviews, tutorials and news (previously: IT Enquirer)
The OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual features two Thunderbolt 2 ports, one USB 3.1 Gen. 1 port and all of the cables you need to start using it immediately. You can set this small-footprint unit to RAID 0, RAID 1, disk spanning and JBOD modes. It has a black minimal design and you can buy it as a bare enclosure or with disks already installed. I got the chance to test the 2TB version.
Thunderbolt 3 docks are being released at a fast pace. The CalDigit TS3 Thunderbolt Station has been around for a month now and it has an edge. Not only does it provide 85W charging power on one of its ports to Apple's Thunderbolt 3 MacBook, but it's also tiny compared to others. And it can be positioned upright, saving space on your desk.
Verbatim is the only manufacturer of optical media that makes dependable media. Even as they’re well over a decade old, their Archival Grade recordable DVDs and their recordable Blu-ray discs can still be burned and read without a glitch. I tested their M-DISC Blu-Ray disc that can hold a whopping 100GB.
Ever since the late Steve Jobs declared war on optical discs for distributing music and movies, the industry and media have been telling us the optical disc is dead. Far from it, I'd say, especially if you think about whether you're comfortable with entrusting your precious data with cloud service providers. There isn't a month going by without a hack or a security breach, ransomware being demanded and other such alarming events. Backing up to optical media has its benefits. And with the right equipment and the media to match, your risk of data loss is considerably lower. The OWC Mercury Pro Optical Drive might fit the bill.
Another year, another release of Corel Painter. The new version is packed with new features that guarantee jaw dropping awesomeness. There just seems no limit to Corel’s ambition to develop an application that is meant to create digital art that looks like the real thing. Combined with the newest Wacom Intuos Pro and its amazing natural feel, Painter 2018 is for digital artists to drool over.
I tested a 480GB OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD with an Atomos Shogun Flame as well as with an iMac. The Mercury Extreme Pro 6G has been certified for use in Blackmagic Design equipment and has a maximum read speed of 559MB/s and write speed of 527MB/s. My own tests revealed slightly lower, although pretty impressive figures.
Telestream just upgraded its Switch QC app and added a range of new features in the process. Switch Pro 4 adds support for DPP AS-11 MXF metadata, decoding and playback of Teletext captions and more.
The last version of SoftRAID that I looked at was version 3. The latest version of the software that delivers RAID 0, 1, 4, 5 and 1+0 without you ever having to buy a RAID box has been fitted out with a new RAID Engine which has been claimed to equal the performance and reliability of dedicated hardware RAID controllers. I tried SoftRAID 5.6 using two and four bare disks I use as spare and backup drives. I tested the solution with RAID 0, 1, 5 and 1+0.
Suites for mastering audio exist in all shapes and forms. IK Multimedia developed a mastering suite together with Gavin Lurssen, the owner of a multiple Grammy award winning mastering studio. It looks exactly like the real thing and is based on Lurssen's studio equipment. The app annexe DAW plug-in incorporates the best practices of the studio.
Objective Development's Little Snitch is your best defence against software that goes out on the Internet not only for updates but sometimes for snooping too. Little Snitch 4 is a firewall, network filter and network monitor that now lets you drill down easily into connections up to individual server level. It comes with a gorgeous interface that shows you where those servers are geographically based.
