The Boyd Arts Blog

 Data Alphabet Soup My last post started with a panicked call about a flash drive. As I worked through it, I realized there was a lot of detail I needed to put on the back burner. One of the significant points I glossed over was the concept of SD card speeds. The difficulty of that discussion lies in the alphabet soup of the transmission and storage of data. In this post, I want to try to answer questions like "How fast is fast enough" or "How big a drive do I need?" The first step of that is to get a clear picture of how we talk about data. In an earlier post on networking, I discussed bits and bytes. Let's begin with a quick review of that. The most basic math in the digital world is that it takes 8 bits to make a single byte. It is also worth being aware of the concept of a "word," which is simply the fixed size of a data unit for a specific system—such as the 24-bit word of an audio sample or a 64-bit word in modern computing. Regardless of the wor...

 What Happened to My Flash Drive? I recently received a panicked call from a friend who couldn't find the flash drive he uses for multi-track field recording. Beyond me scolding him for only having one, it required a look under the hood to figure out what he might be able to get on short notice. The experience the two of us have shared has made us acutely aware that not all USB drives are created equal. Taking that closer look at the requirements for his recording session, I also started to consider that we actually have different storage needs depending on the phase of our work. This post will concentrate on the needs of the capture phase.  Stay tuned for a discussion on the storage needs of the production and archiving stages. Perhaps one of the first questions I should answer is why it might be hard to find an appropriate USB drive on short notice.  While it’s not all that hard to find a cheap USB flash drive or a portable hard drive (a 1TB WD my Passport is under $100...