The smallest, biggest and fastest flash drive you've ever seen
Reminder: We're live at 9 a.m. PT Saturday
I’m Los Angeles writer-photographer Jefferson Graham, host of PhotowalksTV and former USA TODAY columnist, with my photo meets tech meets travel newsletter. The edition is supported by our friends at SmugMug, which hosts my photo website and allows me to sell prints to clients. Get access to our full archive of posts with a paid subscription. The latest Photowalks episode: the lost art of Vegas Neon
If you’re like me, you’re constantly out of room on your computer, phone and desktop drives. You need devices to store photos and videos, important files, and take them with you everywhere, without the hassle of cables to connect them.
So if I told you that you could now buy one of the smallest, fastest flash drives with 2 terabytes (2,000 megs worth!) and that it could fit on your keychain, would you be interested? A flash drive inserts directly to computers, Android phones and even the new iPhone 15 series, sans cables.
The Envoy Pro Mini series from OWC is a joy to use—even if the very hefty price is a good 1/3 higher than competitors. The 1 TB version is $169 and the 2 TB clocks in at $299.
The Solid State Drive version is actually cheaper—at $279. But it’s larger, and housed in a traditional hard drive like case. Think pack of cigarettes vs. a keychain.
The beauty of flash and SSD drives is that there’s no moving parts, like with spinning discs of traditional hard drives, and thus are potentially safer from crashing.*
So why is the Envoy line so expensive? You can buy a 2 TB flash drive on Amazon from a company called SSK for just $139.99. The more well-known SanDisk has a 1 TB version for $99 to OWC’s $169.99 1 TB Envoy.
The difference in speed: 420 megabytes a second for a top line SanDisk compared to 1050 megabytes per second for Envoy.
It took two minutes for me to move 27 GBs of drone video footage to the Envoy vs. 11 minutes on a SanDisk unit. I usually move way more heftier files and folders—when you push out giant video files (my average is 300 to 500 GBs per folder) and photos, you don’t want to stand there waiting all day for them to arrive.
The release of the Apple iPhone 15 series last September and the ability to plug SSD and flash drives directly into the device for the first time put a renewed spotlight on tiny, portable drives.
For years, customers have been nagged with “you’re out of storage” messages, and anyone with a small capacity iPhone with 128 GBs or 256 GBs would find themselves on an endless delete struggle.
With the iPhone 15 series, you can bypass that by recording directly to a drive if you shoot video in the higher resolution LOG, a flat look with mega-large files that needs to be processed. (Note—you can’t connect the drive to record directly in the regular video format. Wouldn’t that be nice?)
About that asterik. *SSD drives from Western Digital and subsidiary SanDisk got a lot of really bad press about a year ago when their units crashed on customers. The situation was so dire influential tech publication TheVerge said it would no longer recommend products from the company. In general, drives will last a finite amount of time. That’s just the way it is.
So I’m off to Spain and Italy Sunday for three weeks of vacationing and filming, and I’ll have the Envoy by my side. Uploading footage from the hotel room at night for backup can work sometimes, but most times it doesn’t, because their Wifi systems detect large file transfers and seem to throttle me when I try uploading at night. I’ll be backing up every night to the Envoy and an external SSD drive for safety—hopefully a nice B&B (we’re staying almost exclusively at them) will let me upload my backup, but either way I’m covered.
LIVE: Speaking of packing
I’ll be live this morning at 9 a.m. California time with all my gear laid out, and talking about what I’m bringing and what I’m leaving behind for the first leg of the trip. Want to talk travel photography and why there’s no full-size camera in my bag? Care to see my new mobile photo backup? Have questions? Please tune in today and let’s chat.
Photo of the Week
As many of you know, I can’t sleep past 5 a.m. (sleeping in for me would be 5:30) and I often go out and take early morning walks, a most magical time, especially when there’s a full Moon!
On Wednesday, I got down to the Manhattan Beach Pier just before 6 a.m. and the Moon was huge and setting right over the Pier. It was amazing. I quickly ran down to get the shot, and started walking towards the Roundhouse at the end of the Pier to get a tighter shot. But the Moon’s presence was fleeting. I got about half way down the Pier, and it was gone.
Moral to the story: be early, especially on special days, and you’ll have more to work with. I should have left the house at 5:15!
Speaking of Piers: O’Side
Remember a few weeks ago I told you all about the really cool and so photogenic San Diego beachside community of Oceanside? This week, heartbreaking news—the O’side Pier went ablaze Thursday afternoon at 3, with such intense flames many assumed the Pier itself was a goner.
Update: 90% of the Pier was miraculously saved by incredible fire crews, and only the tail end of the Pier is destroyed. The great news: one of California’s longest, historic and beautiful piers will continue to live on, as local officials will have to repair just the end, where the old, long closed Ruby’s restaurant was demolished, along with the current food stand the Brine Box. The Pier and several blocks of beach are closed, for now, but will reopen again soon.
Best wishes to everyone in Oceanside from your friends at Photowalks.
SmugMug
Thank you SmugMug for supporting Photowalks. I use the platform to run my website, display my photo efforts, sell prints to clients and backup my photos and videos. I can also use their tools to create cute collages, like the one below from Dinah’s! Take advantage of SmugMug’s free two-week trial at http://www.smugmug.com
L.A. Story
Since 1959, Dinah’s Family Restaurant has been an L.A. staple, known for all-you-can eat fried chicken (hot or cold!) and the sort of comfort food we’re not supposed to eat anymore.
In a tale of the modern era, after 60 plus years, the owner was told the building would be coming down to make way for a new multi-story mixed use building, and while he had the option to stay and work around the construction, he decided instead to move.
He’ll be leaving behind a classic “Googie” space-age themed interior masterpiece, the likes of which we just don’t see anymore. It’s closing on Tuesday and then re-opening at 4130 Sepulveda Blvd. in Culver City, near fellow local landmark Tito’s Tacos, on May 6.
I visited Friday night for one last visit, and the place was packed. Sadly, while the fried chicken was great, everything else we had was yucky. The Grilled Cheese was cold, they were out of baked potatoes, and the mashed potatoes looked like it belonged in an old Swanson’s TV Dinner package, smothered in some sort of sauce that neither of us wanted to touch.
That said, I’ll really miss driving by and seeing the welcome Dinah’s sign in Westchester and the classic architecture, but frankly, I won’t miss the food.
OK, time for me to start packing for the trip. Thanks for taking the time to watch, read and listen, and see you on the live show later today!
Jeff
What kind of 'cage' is your IPhone in? The one with 2 handles for shooting. (Min 11:23 in above video) Also, is there any type of gimbal that you like for IPhone?
Thank you.