Why size matters a lot
There was a time when I was traveling a lot to the US with a backpack full of hard drives, cables, PSUs and other types of equipment. Needless to say that on top of a 25 pound burden on my back, I never got through airport security without at least taking out half of the clutter and explaining myself.
Once arrived at my destination, which was usually a trade show or product clinic, I've started to install software and hoped that all the drives were in good condition. Just in case, I had backup drives with me. The usual setup consisted of a rented silver Mac Pro, two external Firewire drives for audio samples and another one for other media content.
Today, the world is a totally different place. The Mac Pros was replaced with Laptops but the one thing that made all the differences was the advent of the SSD. Before that, we were never able to replace the chunky 3.5" drives with smaller versions due to performance considerations. Instead, we stuck with a heap of hard disks in heavy enclosures for a long while.
Nowadays, I travel with is a single OWC Thunderbay Mini and a Mac Book Pro. The Thunderbay holds 4 SSDs. The projects and sessions on show open much faster and the CPU load on the computer is lower – for the technical minded, the data throughput is about 1.3GB/s! Performance-wise, it is like taking an entire studio with me – checked in as hand luggage. The total weight is a fraction and setting everything up means connecting a single Thunderbolt cable. Happy times.
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