Any question answered...

Shimano 5800 calipers would be a decent upgrade. They can usually be found second hand for less than £40 or buy new for around £25 each.

PlanetX want me to buy this thru axle for £30 for my Bish Bash Bosh frame. Is it really going to not fit any other axle? It’s the female nut that I’m not sure about.

They won't necessarily work well with levers of that age: cable pull has varied over the years.

It's entirely possible that they'll work fine though.

What, specifically, are the rims? If they're old/budget, then the brake track could just be shit and you'll have to suck it up.

Compressionless cable housing? Good routing: no tight bends or doubling-back?

Maybe try different pads: not all pads perform well with all rims.

The latest Shimano calipers do have increased mechanical advantage, but I doubt your levers pull the same amount of cable as current ones do.

yes compressionless cable housing and proper brake cable - no tight bends
when i pull the pads hit the rim fine

it could be cable pull issue, i have the pads right on the edge of touching the rim though as its true, and almost immediate contact when pulling - i can then pull more on the lever but the braking power does not increase :(

perhaps its the track !

If you can move the levers more after the pads are touching the rim and power isn't increasing much then there's compression somewhere. You should be able to see some flex in the caliper if you look at it while pulling the lever.

i can then pull more on the lever but the braking power does not increase

^ What he said.

If the lever is moving, the caliper arms aren't.

Either you have some slack in the cable or your calipers are made of blancmange.

Most thruaxle designs use a threaded insert that's semi-captive in the frame/fork, so you're reliant on the threading being consistent between thruaxle makers, but with that kind of frame I'd expect the frame/fork to come with an appropriate axle.

Thinking of moving our portable hard drives over to SSD. Have had a few spinning drives fail on shoots recently so want to minimise repeats of this. Longevity isn't an issue. If we can get 2-3 years from an SSD that's fine. Just can't have it taking a knock and stopping working. Are SSDs the answer?

We've used these religiously since they came out and before then we used the originals (without the ATC casing).

https://cvp.com/product/g-tech_gt-gdevatctb1tb?gclid=CjwKCAjws6jVBRBZEiwAkIfZ2gwpgicbSSHBIMwW6ehJkNoSR-hOnMoL3DdSI_Oex4Eba7NVwSvDORoCrpQQAvD_BwE

We use them mainly as the ev cartridge unplugs and plugs straight into our ev RAIDs which are a big part of our workflow. There are also various ev adaptors for other media (RED mini mag/atomos ssd caddy/firewire/cfast etc. The ev system works great for us and I don't want to ditch that just yet as we've invested a lot into it. However we've had two of the 1TB ATCs fail in the past month (never had one fail before in the years we've had them).

Despite the two failures, I still rate GTech over LaCie etc (many many more Lacie failures in the past). So in terms of SSD I'm looking at either:

https://www.jigsaw24.com/pws/ProductDetails.ice?ProductID=X079AAM

...meaning we can continue to use them in our ev RAID workflow. 1TB coming in at 280+VAT. However I'm not sold on their build quality and we'd end up putting them in the ATC case which means they're bloody massive.

Or:

https://www.jigsaw24.com/pws/ProductDetails.ice?ProductID=X628AAT

Which are tiny and cheaper (250+VAT) and more rugged. Only USB 3.1gen2 which isn't ideal. And more annoyingly no compatibility with our ev workflow. I also don't like the fact that they have rounder surfaces so I couldn't stack them on a shelf but that might just be me and I could always knock up some kind of specific storage solution for them if we got more than 10.

Questions:

1. When's a good time to buy into SSD from a price perspective? Anyone got a good arc showing price drop over time?
   
2. Is it worth going wild and considering SD instead? Though presume read/write times are considerably slower except on super fast (expensive) versions? I think there's a 300mb sandisk but it caps out at 128GB which at £300 cost prohibitive for the terrabytes we'd need. Ok this question is answered.
   
3. Is SSD worth it full stop? Are they really that reliable in comparison to rugged spinning drives? If we bought say a dozen of those small rugged ssds and a couple didn't get used for say 6 months-1 year as we had the others in rotation, would it still have a better chance of working fine compared to a spinning disc that's been sitting gathering dust on a shelf? i.e. is it an urban myth that rotating drives need to be kept spinning regularly to keep them functional?
   

1. dont know
   
2. no, SSD are quicker - its a different type of storage, see:
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3frnBoqqI_Q
   
   
3. yes, generally. But workout the relationship of how much stuff you have, how often you need to access it, how fast you need to access it and how much you want to spend.
   

That link is hilarious - thanks. EDIT: obviously HE'S not hilarious - but the idea amuses me greatly.

Generally we take 2 x 1TB drives to each shoot day - 1 as master, 1 as safety copy. Then keep the safety and master until backed up on the RAID and project master deliverables are backed up on a couple of cloud services. In honesty we don't have a long term solution for rushes which is a shame but just not cost effective. We'd end up adding 50TB of RAID 10 each year. If nothing else we'd run out of physical space in the office : )

Not too fussed by spend as it's an essential item. If we lost a days rushes we'd likely lose the client even though insurance would cover us for losses. We currently rotate around 48TB of our 'best' rushes (a few shots saved from each project we've ever done just in case we ever need something for a reel), then 12TB of project master deliverables, and we have about 20 x 1TB ev mobile drives - 6 of which are in those ATC cases, the rest are the original metal ones. About 15ks worth of storage. In the mid to long term I'd like to get something along these lines: http://www.jigsaw24.com/g-technology-g-rack-12-120tb-12-bay-shared-nas-storage-solution/rackmount-raid/-/fcp-product/26369

But finding it hard to psych myself up to spend 30k on a hard drive.

Have considered LTO etc in the past but just seemed like another faff/system to invest in and got disheartened quickly.

Just seen those R-series ones on Amazon for 250ish including VAT seemingly which almost sells it to me. What I like in particular is the fact they're not supposed to overheat so maintain speeds even after long transfers. Generally we'll spend a scary hour at the end of shoot days (or split it into a few sessions depending on time) to offload cards. The spinning ev drives get noticeably hot and transfers do slow down:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/G-Technology-G-DRIVE-mobile-SSD-black/dp/B078L9F34G/ref=sr_1_2?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1521138630&sr=1-2&keywords=MOBILE+SSD+R-SERIES+1TB

Think they'd be legit?

How much to fit mudguards, a cassette, and disc rotors?
Ballpark. Pls thks.

Does anyone recall 80s era double drop bars and can provide photo? #notthegrail

Mudguards can be a pita

£35 ish? Cassette and rotors are a two minute job assuming nothing is fckd

Cheers.
Just seen cassette is missing sprocket spacer(s). Ballz.
But did get screws for rotors.
And may have time tonight.
So. You know. Swingz. Etc and so on.

Like this?

1 Attachment

These are the ones I'm familiar with but (some lunatic here) is talking about a second set of drops.

Just install them like Gaston does and you've basically got the Grail bars:

Are you set on buying from Jigsaw? I work at Escape Technology. We like to beat competitors where possible :)
Feel free to call, sales guys are usually happy to talk through solutions and won’t try to steer you in a direction you don’t want.

I don't know anything about specialist video hardware, but isn't the real problem that your initial write from the camera is to storage with no redundancy?

Surely someone has packaged 2 drives and hardware mirroring into one rugged box?

SSD vs HDD is a different question. I think https://hblok.net/blog/storage/ is the nearest there is to a proper price comparison, in USD/MB, log scale:

you're website certificate has expired

LaCie do one which I've heard is decent but I still have a (probably irrational) fear of their drives failing. We were forced to use LaCie drives when I was an employee years ago at another company and easily 5 out of 20 drives completely died within first 6 months.

Appreciate mirroring mitigates risk in some ways etc. Rugged raids are pretty new as these things go so I'm not wildly concerned about making two transfers initially (leaving 3 copies once complete which is pretty much the industry standard way of doing it to my knowledge on shoots of our moderate to small scale). Also I'd be more inclined to to have distinct copies at different locations than a single rugged RAID.

Thanks for the chart - interesting and I wonder what the various climbs are (around 2010 / 2014 / 2017)? SSD, from that at least, looks very much to be slowing down in terms of rate of descent so I'd imagine as good a time as any to start picking them some up to test workflows. Cheers!

It's 2019 already? Fuck me, 2018 really flew by.