Since I am batch scanning my slides, I didn’t notice soon enough that many of these jellies had blown out highlights which I was trying to fix in Photoshop. Unfortunately, once highlights have no data in them, there aren’t any real good ways to fix the images. I found a way to adjust my scanner to deal with these highlights. It’s makes my post processing a little more involved but it allows me to have useful images where, without the change, I would have discarded them.

The image above is my normal settings for VueScan. They work pretty well for most things but not so well for this eight-ribbed hydromedusa. This is a small jellyfish – not more than one-quarter inch in diameter. Scanning at these setting produced the following image:

I cropped a small section of the image so that I could show how bad the scan is.

The whites are completely blown out and the image could not be saved.

I tried adjusting the image using “Levels” but using the black point eye dropper for the darkest part of the image still left the whites unusable.

There was also an additional marine invertebrate in the image that I could not identify with this scan.

This is the only image that I have of an eight-ribbed hydromedusa so it was important for me to try and save it.

I tried different settings in VueScan and come up with one that I really liked:

It was the  same setting that I used for normal scanning with the exception of changing my “white point” from a setting of “1” to a setting of “0.03.” That produced an image that looks like this:

The eight ribs of the hydromedusa are not blown out and now you can see the hitchhiker which I believe to be a juvenile long-finned squid.

After the initial scan, I was not able to use my standard batch processing of images in Adobe Photoshop CS5 as it also tended to blow out some of the highlights but not nearly as bad as my original scan.

I processed the image manually in Adobe Photoshop CS5 and used “Shadows and Highlights” to make my adjustments.

The final image is:

I think that I achieved the result that I was after. I had already scanned my slides of sea gooseberries and purple jellyfish and found that there were many in both directories with blown out highlights so I went ahead a rescanned the images using my new settings. I saved the settings in VueScan and named the settings “blownouthighlights.ini” so that I could use the settings for future scanning.

Here is another example of purple jellyfish that I was able to use after scanning using my blown out highlights setting. This is the raw scan:

Now the finished image after Photoshop editing:

My original scan of this jellyfish was so blown out that it was unusable. I found that I could scan all the images in this category using the blown out highlights settings and processing them in Photoshop. There was a little extra work but the ease of editing the formerly blown out images was worth the extra effort.

© 2012, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

This is the photo of the bell of a lion’s mane jellyfish. There are two hitchhikers aboard the jellyfish. There is a Chaetognatha (below), Spadella cephaloptera, which is also known as an arrow worm. Arrow worms are transparent or translucent dart-shaped animals covered by a cuticle. They are predatory marine worms that are a major component of plankton worldwide.

The chaetognatha was cool but it wasn’t what I was excited about. In the upper left hand corner is a tiny, baby long-finned squid, Loligo pealei.

I have never seen a squid in New Jersey. I have seen their eggs but that is it. I am estimating that the squid was 1/4” to 1/2” long. I have a few other shots of the same jellyfish but from different angles. It is more difficult to see that it is a squid in the other photos but since they were taken one-after-the-other of the same jellyfish, I assumed that what I have is a view of the squid with its tentacles tucked underneath its body.

Now that I know what a baby squid looks like, I have found it on another photo. I missed it on the first scan because of the way that the scanner exposed the image. It blew out all the white areas. I rescanned using manual settings (this will be the subject of an upcoming blog) and lo and behold-there was another juvenile squid.

This is an eight-ribbed hydromedusa. It is the only photo that I have of one and our little hitchhiker is aboard.

So this was just one of the exciting things that I am experiencing as I continue on my quest. I will be bringing more to this site as I find them.

© 2012, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

All of us at Herb Segars Photography would like to wish all of you Happy Holidays and a Happy and Healthy New Year!!!!!

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

On the plus side is seeing images that I made twenty years ago. I always thought that I could remember every image that I have taken but was I wrong! I look at some of these images and go “Wow, did I really take that picture?”

Before I started this project, I used to scan one slide at a time. That led me to only scan enough slides for each subcategory to fill one page in my web site photo gallery. That was a maximum of twenty images. The rest resided in albums. When I originally scanned the slides, I wasn’t aware about the importance of IPTC information embedded in digital files. I burned all the scanned slides as TIFF files onto CD’s and did not keep a copy on my PC. Every time I needed one of the digital files, I copied it off the CD to my hard drive and used it. That meant that I would need to add all the caption and image information to the file before sending it out. It took what should have been a five-minute project and made it a 30-minute task. Earlier this year, I decided to move all the images from the CD’s to my computer and get everything captioned and labeled. I am glad that I did it as I had a few CD’s that I could not read anymore which meant rescanning the original slides.

I was talking to my son, Tom, the other day about my project. He is recovering from a traumatic brain injury and I am constantly amazed with his progress. I asked if he knew why I was going to scan all my slides. My answer to him would have been that they are not doing me any good in albums on a shelf in my office. I need to get them on the web so that they can be seen. His answer to me about my reasoning was “for ease of access to the images.” I started to correct him but when I thought about what he said, I realized that this was the most important reason. Yesterday, his assessment was tested. I needed to upload 25 high resolution files to a Dropbox account. Some of them would have been on CD’s and it would have been a lot of work to get them in the condition required for delivery. Instead, I opened up my Dropbox folder and dragged and dropped images into it. I was done with my upload in less than 30 minutes. How great is that. Before I move on, if you have not heard about Dropbox, it a site where you can get 2 GB of storage space on the cloud. All you need is a gmail account. You can use this space to back up your computer files or to share photos or files with friends. I have been using it as a backup destination for my phone data and also for sharing with friends.

Once I realized how many slides I had to scan, I sat down and developed a work flow to make things easier. Here’s how it goes. I use Vuescan to batch scan slides with a Nikon 5000ED scanner with a Nikon SF-210 slide feeder. I can scan fifty slides at a time. Since all my slides are divided into categories like Fish, Invertebrates, Rays, Turtles, Marine Mammals, etc., I do each category and subcategory separately. Subcategories of fish would be Band Sea Bass, Black Sea Bass, etc. I could scan much faster if I just put fifty slides in at a time and scanned them all into a generic folder and then separated them afterwards. I hadn’t thought of doing that until just now and I may change my workflow in that direction. One of the hassles of doing things the way that I am now is that when I have subcategories with only a few slides, it is tedious to make a new folder, scan three slides, process those three and then move on.

Okay, I batch scan all the slides in a subcategory. Each slide is scanned at 4000 dpi and at 16 bits. The scanned image file is approximate 130 mb in size and are 1.3” x 0.9” at 4000 dpi. After scanning, I rename each slide to accommodate my current labeling system, add descriptions, keywords, copyright information, etc. For this I use IMatch. I have been using this program for a long time and it is extremely flexible and powerful.

As an example shown above, I can take all my images in a subcategory and assign them to categories. I the case above, the great barracuda images in this category are assigned to “Animals” “Fishes” “Marine” Barracuda (Sphyraenidae)” “Great Barracuda” and “Sphyraena barracuda.” I also assign other categories to the images such as “Location” “Oceans” “Atlantic” “South Carolina” etc. Once I have checked off the categories that I want for the images, I run a script called “Copy IMatch categories to IPTC keywords.”

All the categories that I assigned are now keywords in each image. If all the images were taken of the same subject and the image caption is the same for all, I would open the IMatch IPTC editor and add the remainder of the information that I want:

I entered the caption information and all the other criteria (except the object name which is the image number) and press the “Close” button and IMatch adds the information to the IPTC section of each image.

Now that I have completed my labeling work, I now have to process the images. When I was scanning one image at a time, I would open each individually in Photoshop and make all my adjustments. If I did this with the approximately 25,000 slides that I have, I would be at this forever. So I came up with another plan of action. I use a filter in Photoshop named “Perfectly Clear.” I have been very pleased with the way it processes and image. I run a batch program from Adobe Bridge to process each image in a folder using the Perfectly Clear filter.

Just a heads up, since my scanning process will go on for quite awhile, I am going to be adding some of the scanned photos to my blog posts and will probably be doing posts about the images themselves.

After the images are process with the filter, I open each one individually and crop each image to 8” x 12” at 300 dpi, and do all my usual Photoshop operations like spot removal, backscatter removal, etc.

I have an incredible sequence of a monkfish eating a black sea bass. What I forgot was that there were images in that sequence that I never scanned. This is one of them. The sea bass is in the monkfish’s throat and he is swallowing it. I scanned the image before this one and the image after but not this one. It was one of my “Wow” finds.

My wife, Veronica, and I would stop at the “2M” buoy about a mile outside of Manasquan Inlet. We usually stopped on an incoming tide which was when the water was the clearest around the buoy.

Other boaters would stop and ask if we were in trouble or did the person in the water need rescuing. Veronica and I would just laugh because they never realized what we could see beneath the surface.

On this day, we were blessed with the presence of an ocean sunfish (Mola mola). They are gentle giants that reach a height of ten feet from top fin tip  to bottom fin tip and a weight of 2000 pounds. They feed on jellyfish so they are no threat to humans.

While I was snorkeling, Veronica had a real treat. She saw the ocean sunfish breach out of the water. I have never seen that behavior and I am really glad that she got to see it. Like many animal encounters, you just have to be in the right place at the right time. I did not realize until I started scanning how many images that I have of ocean sunfish. The crazy thing is that I have seen one in a few years. It’s not because they are not there but because I am not in the right place at the right time.

Sea Ravens are members of the scorpionfish family. They come in four colors: brown, tan, yellow and red. The brown and tan are the most common. They yellow would be the next most common and the least common is the red variety.

Underwater, colors are lost as you go deeper in the water column. One of the first colors lost is red. It is lost at a depth of about ten feet. This red sea raven looks very dark colored. You can see the red color by shining a light on the fish. Photographers have to use a flash to get the red color in the photograph.

Now that I have gone off on a tangent, I am going to return to my slide scanning stories. First, if you have as many slides as I do to scan, you really need to either send them out and pay to have them done or purchase a quality scanner like the Nikon 5000ED and a slide feeder like the Nikon SF210. I don’t think that I would have undertaken this task with those two pieces of equipment. The bad part to purchasing the scanner and feeder is that they are not made anymore and you have to search places like EBay to find them. Additionally, they cost more now used than they did new. My two units together with shipping cost $2800.00. New, they were just shy of $1700.00. The plus side is that when your scanning project is done, you can sell them on EBay and retrieve a good part of your purchase price back. The other two things that I am finding invaluable in this project is the Vuescan scanning software and the IMatch image database program.

That’s all for today.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

scanner individually. I did some research and found that Nikon makes a slide feeder attachment, the SF-210 that attaches to the Nikon Coolscan 4000 ED or the 5000 ED. Unfortunately, I don’t own either of those scanners. The attachment does not work with my Nikon Coolscan V ED.

Well, I finally made up my mind and decided to see my scanner and buy a Nikon Coolscan 5000 ED. What really surprised me was how expensive they have become. First, they are not made anymore so anyone that wants one will pay dearly. I started looking on eBay and found a few for sale. Rather than bidding and hoping to be successful, I made an offer on a Nikon 5000 ED scanner with a SF-210 slide feeder and my offer was accepted.

The final price was 75% more than what the two items sold for when new. After making my payment, I received the scanner and slide feeder three days later. I unpacked it and realized that the 5000 ED scanner looked very much like my V ED.

I set everything up and started scanning. The first few batches of slides went through just fine and I was really happy. I needed some time to develop a workflow that made the process as painless as possible. On my third batch of slides, I had a slide jam in the transport mechanism. This happened a few more times and it frustrated me. One of my hopes was to put 50 slides in the feeder and let them scan while I did other things. I did not want to babysit the feeder.

I started searching on line for a solution and found one in a reasonable amount of time. It seems that the spring that holds the slides in place before they are fed into the scanner is too strong. The fix is extremely simple and it took me less than ten minutes.

First power the scanner off and remove the SF-210 from the scanner.

There are two screws on the bottom of the unit that have to be removed. You will need a small Phillips head screwdriver for all the screws. The ones on the bottom of the unit are smaller than those on the top.

Next, remove the three screws from the top of the unit.

The problem spring is the one on the left side (longer spring). You will need two very sophisticated parts to finish the fix – paperclips.

I put two paperclips together, attached one to the post in the SF-210 and attached the spring to the second paperclip. That’s it. Put everything back together and scan away. I have not had a single jam since the fix. How cool is that?

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

So what you say? I have owned two slide scanners in my life. The first was a Polaroid Sprintscan 4000. It was a great scanner but one day, it died. My second and current scanner is a Nikon Coolscan V ED. It is also a great scanner but scanning slides is like watching grass grow. It is slow and tedious. I initially used the software that came with the Polaroid scanner to scan and then later used Nikon’s scanning software. They were both okay but I kept looking for a better option. I thought that I found it with Lasersoft’s Silverfast scanning software. I used it as a stand alone program and as a plugin for Photoshop. Truth be told, I always struggled with the software but I kept at it and was able to get some good scans. The problem was that each slide took about ten minutes to scan and process in Photoshop. At six slides an hour, my 120 slides would take 20 hours to scan. If that isn’t bad enough, I have thousands more slides to scan from my slide library.

I have looked over the years for other slide scanning software. There was one in particular that received rave reviews but I could never seem to get it to work to my satisfaction. The software is VueScan by Ed Hamrick. I saw some really great advantages to the program and I really wanted to make it work. The first advantage is cost. Silverfast is expensive and it only works with one scanner so if you have a flatbed scanner and a slide scanner, you will need a separate license for each. The current price for Silverfast 8 is $49.00 for the light version, $119.00 for the plus version and $299.00 for Silverfast 8 Studio. I am not going to explain the differences in each version. I currently own version 6 of the Silverfast 8 Studio (there is no version 7) but I will have to pay for an upgrade if I want to own version 8.

I decided to give VueScan another try. My biggest problem with the software is that I found it confusing to set up. I downloaded the software and did some googling to find out how to use it. I found a pretty good tutorial manual here. Before I explain the program, here are some reasons for my going in this direction. The software comes in two versions, standard for $49.00 and one year of free upgrades or the professional version for $79.00 with free lifetime upgrades. It also supports 1750 different scanners so you don’t need a separate license for each scanner and if you ever change scanners, you can still use VueScan with the new software. Another plus for owners of Silverfast software is that you can purchase the standard version of VueScan for $49.00 and then send Ed Hamrick (owner and developer of the program) and email with a scan of your Silverfast serial number (in my case, the latest version was a download so I sent him a copy of the confirming email) and a statement saying that you would not purchase version 8 of Silverfast and he will send you a free upgrade to the professional version of VueScan. I decided that if I could get the program to work to my satisfaction, I would move in that direction.

First, VueScan is a stand alone program and not a plugin for Photoshop. I thought that this might slow down my processing time but I was wrong. You can set VueScan to open the scanned image in Photoshop as soon as you hit the “Save” icon.

Let’s start. Before scanning, it is important to set up the program for your needs. I am going to explain how mine is setup for scanning with my Nikon Coolscan V ED (LS-50). When the program opens, there are tabs for different menus.

The first tab is marked “Input.” I set the first dropdown to “Scan to file” as that is what I intended to do. There are other choices like “Copy” which will turn your scanner into a copy machine or “Scan to Print” which will print your scanned file.

The source is set for my scanner. The media is slide film and the scan resolution is the highest for my scanner at 4000 dpi.

“Rotation” should be kept at “Right” since it’s easier to rotate an image in Photoshop while processing it. My scanner will autofocus (not every scanner can) so I set it to autofocus “Always.”

The next choice really helped me speed things along. “Auto scan” set to “Scan” or “Preview” will automatically start scanning your slide as soon as the scanner is ready. You don’t have to push the “Preview” or “Scan” button for each new slide.

I don’t use “Auto save” but it will ask you to put in a slide name for each image that is scanned.

I chose “Scan from preview” so that the preview and scan were done at the same time rather than in two separate operations. Changes can be made to the scan before saving the file. Each menu has a button at the bottom for “More” settings. In the beginning you don’t have to worry about this but here is what you will see in the “Input” tab after selection “More.”

There are the other options available but none are necessary until you understand how the software works.

Next we have the “Crop” tab.

The crop tab dictates the boundaries of the image are. I set mine to “Auto” which worked pretty well.

You will have the opportunity to adjust the boundaries after scanning.

I left the “Preview area” at “Current.”

The “Filter” tab has a few options.

I chose “Infrared clean” of “Light.” This options cleans dust and scratches from images. This option does not work when scanning prints.

I also chose “Restore colors” which helps bring back colors in older slides. I don’t use “Restore fading” and I do all my sharpening in “Photoshop.”

The “Color” tab has a lot of choices and some can be very important. “Color balance” should be set at “White balance” or “Neutral.” Don’t use “Auto levels” as it doesn’t seem to work well with my slides. Use “Neutral” when your photo has a color cast like green water in an underwater image or a sunset photo. When you use “Neutral, go the “Input” tab and change “Media type” to “Image.” The next three settings are ones that you don’t have to do anything with until you get more proficient with the program.

Download the manual that I linked to above and read it. It is only 52 pages long but it explains all of the settings. You can set the film type (if yours is available) in the dropdown menu or if not, leave it as “Generic.”

“Slide brand” for color slides is “Color” and “Slide type” is “Slide.” I profiled my scanner with an IT8 transparency so my “Scanner color space” is set to “ICC Profile.” The next two boxes show the scanner profile name and the location of the IT8 target file. If you don’t profile your scanner, set the “Scanner color space” to “Built-in.”

“Printer color space” is set to “sRGB” as most printers use that color space. “Film color space” is set to “Built-in” and both “Output color space” and “Monitor color space” are set to “Adobe RGB” which is the color space that I work in.

Just an additional point, if you want to reset your choices to the default setting, check the “Default options” box. Remember that checking the box will cause the loss of your current choices.

The “Output” tab allows you to set the “Default folder” where images will be stored.

I set the “Printed size” to “Scan size” but you can set it to 5” x 7” or 8” x 12.” This doesn’t affect the size of the file.

I chose not to use “Auto file name” and chose “Tiff file” because that is the type of file that I use for processed images.

The “Tiff file name” has the name of the current image. If you are going to use the “Infrared clean” option in the “Filter” tab, you need to use the “64 bit RGBI” option.

The three boxes in red are optional. I do not use them but I filled in information so that you could see how to use them.

The last tab is the “Prefs” tab. You can set “Language”, “Font size”, “Crop units” and “Printed units.” The “External viewer” check box will open your saved scan in the editing software of your choice. I have my Windows 7 computer setup to open Tiff files in Photoshop CS5.

The “External editor” check box will open up the text editor of your choice if you are doing OCR (optical character recognition) of a scanned document.

Now that everything is set, it is time to click on the “Preview” button to see our first slide. Since I chose “Auto scan”, I don’t have to click on the preview button. The image will scan as soon as the scanner is ready.

Once the image is on screen and in the “Preview” tab, I can adjust my outside borders by moving each border separately. There are plenty of times when no adjustments were needed.

You can click on the “Scan” tab to see what the scanned image looks like. With the “Preview” set to high resolution, they look the same except for the border lines which won’t show in the “Scan” tab:

All that’s left to do is hit the “Save” button and the image will open up in your photo editing software.

You can set the white and black points on your image using the black/white graph. It is found by clicking the “Image” menu in the top menu and selection “b/w graph.”

Here is what mine looked like while scanning, after scanning and after making a change to the white point:

The white point is the left hand triangle and the black point is the right hand triangle. These are not be be confused with the histogram of the image.

In the left hand image above, I moved the white point to the right to balance the image. The right hand image shows the histogram for the same image.

I have been extremely pleased with the results that I have achieved using VueScan. I find it works rather fast and that the scans have very good quality. I took Ed up on his offer on a free upgrade to the professional version of VueScan. I was happy to provide the statement that I would not be purchasing verion 8 of Silverfast. I am now a VueScan convert.

My suggestion before starting to use VueScan is to download the manual that I linked to at the beginning of this blog or go to the VueScan website and read through their tutorials. If you get hooked on VueScan, you might want to buy the VueScan Bible by Sasha Steinhoff from Amazon Books. Click on the image below.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

The site that I settled on is Uprinting. Once I setup an account and entered all my information, I went to the products page to choose to make business cards. First I checked on pricing based on how I wanted to the card to look. These were my settings:

Then, I clicked on the tab in the top row that says “Business Identity” and clicked on “Business Cards.”

It brought up the following screen:

Since I was using my own artwork (photos), I choose the first option under “Getting Started.” The next screen presents the different size options available.

I chose “U.S. Standard” in a landscape format. Then I clicked on the “Design Now!” button.

You can pick out one of their designs or you can make your own. I choose “Blank.” If you like the text layout of one of their standard cards, choose it and add your photo or artwork for a background on either the front only or the front and back of the card.

I had already designed a few cards and had photos from my computer in the “My Images” section. If you don’t have any online, click on the “Upload Images” button to bring images in from your computer. Remember that they have to be high enough resolution to print well. You will get a warning if your image size or resolution is not adequate for the layout. I did not resize any of my images to 3.5” x 2” but if they don’t look good on the screen, I would resize them in the computer before uploading. I am going to pick the image for the front of my card from those in “My Images” section. Holding my mouse over the image, I was given the options to drag and drop the image or to make it the background:

I selected “Make It Background.”

Although it looks like it needs to be resized, it doesn’t. The photo will fit the area where it is the background. I selected “Apply.”

Now that I had the background for the front of my card, I added text.

Fist, click on the “Add Text” button. Put text into the box and drag your mouse over the text to select it. Choose the color drop down box and choose the text color. You can bold or italicize the text or change the font family and size. I continued adding lines until I got the front side of the card the way that I wanted it.

You edit the text on the left side of the screen. I put in the first line of text and used the “copy” and “paste” buttons to put in the other lines. I edited them and used my mouse to drag over the three lines of text. I was then given options to “Align the Left Edges” of all the lines and then to “Equalize the Vertical Gaps” of all three lines. When I finished with my text, it looked like this:

I used the “Align” drop down to the right of the “Rotate” button to align the text to suit my needs. Once I finished the front side of the card, I clicked on the “Back Side” button in the lower left corner of the screen.

I chose a sandbar shark for the backside image.

I added some text and I was done. I also have an option for a 3D view of the card.

You can use the slider to turn the card around and look at both sides:

If you are working on your design but don’t finish, you can save your design and come back later to finish. You can also email your design to yourself or to a friend for feedback. If you don’t have photos  or designs for your card, you can search for them and purchase them direct from the Uprinting web site. It took about a week-and-a-half from when I placed my order until I received my cards.

I do have to say that I made some mistakes with my designs. The most important thing to keep in mind when you are using images for backgrounds is how well the text will show over the image. My friend, Joe Pakan, used Uprinting for his card. I helped with the layout. He wanted to have a photo of sand dollars on the front of the card. I tried black text over the image but it didn’t look good. What eventually worked was to make the image darker in my computer using Photoshop and then using white text. On the back of his card, we used a photo of Joe diving on an artificial reef off New Jersey. The end result was very attractive and Joe was happy with his cards.

The bottom line for me was an excellent product at a reasonable price. I remember buying business cards for three or four times the price that I paid for these and I didn’t have anywhere near as many options available for their design. If you would like to give Uprinting a try for your business cards, please use this link: Business Cards. For other printing items, try these links: Flyer Printing, Postcard Printing, and Catalog Printing.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

I currently have fourteen hard drives attached to my computer. Nine are used for photos. There is one drive for my Raw files, another for finished Tiff’s in categories from A-L and a third drive for finished Tiff’s in categories from L-Z. I have found myself in a position that in the not-so-distant future, I will be in need for another drive as one the two drives that hold the finished Tiff’s will be getting full. Each of the photo drives backs up on alternating days to two additional drives. That makes nine drives in all. I have a hard drive for my operation system and data files, another for backups, two additional drives for miscellaneous files such as video and movies and a drive that I call my “spare.”

My computer case will hold five drives and I used to have five in there. I found that if I needed to replace one it was too much of a hassle to take the case apart and I also felt that the extra drives added to the load on the cases power supply. I decided to buy multi-drive external enclosures. My first enclosure holds two hard drives and I have had it for many years and have never had a single issue with it. The only downside to the case is that it has a separate output cable for each drive. When I was looking for a four bay enclosure, I wanted to find a unit that only had one cable out for all four drives. An enclosure like this uses a port-multiplier. It allows the computer to see the four bay enclosure as four separate hard drives or to utilize RAID and have the enclosure seen as one large drive. I opted for four separate hard drives.

My first two four bay enclosures were from Addonics. They were mini storage towers. There were a little bit of a hassle to get working and putting the drives in was a chore as each drive had its own power and data cable. My hands did nit fit into the case and I did my share of swearing during the installation. Each of the drives sits on a set of rails and is held in place by four screws. The enclosures are not inexpensive (compared to others which I now own). When I purchased the towers, they were selling for about $230 USD. I saw on the web site today that they are now $169 USD.

Both enclosures worked okay for a few years and then one developed a problem in the port multiplier and the computer could not see the drives. I purchased a replacement port multiplier for $89 USD and installed it in the enclosure and all was well again. A few months ago, the power supply went in the second enclosure and I was not happy. The power supply was more than have the cost of the enclosure so I felt that it was time to look for a new supplier. I went to my favorite place to buy computer equipment: NewEgg. I looked at their external enclosures and settled on a unit made by Rosewill. I read user reviews and one of the downsides to the reviews was the included PCI Express RAID controller card. Since I already had a card installed in my machine, I was worried about it so I placed my order for a Rosewill RSV-S4-6G SATA 150 & 300 4 x Hot-Swappable 3.5″ Drive Bays RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 5+spare, Spanning and JBOD. The second reason for ordering a Rosewill enclosure was because I already owned a couple of their two bay enclosures at work and really liked their quality. I found out after ordering this enclosure that it was discontinued but that didn’t bother me either as I hoped to have it for many years.

When I opened the box, I was impressed that it was a totally tool less enclosure. I was also happy to see that the drives plugged into the board at the back of the enclosure. No more messing with power and data cables. Hooray!!!! I had four drives installed in less than five minutes. I plugged in the power cable, attached the sata cable to the computer and turned on the external enclosure. As it came on, I saw each of the drives recognized. I was done. I was really impressed. There are lights on the front of the enclosure that indicate power to the unit, connection to the computer and activity to each drive. The only downside to the case is that the power switch is in the back but since I hardly ever turn it off, it really didn’t matter to me.

Before I go further, it’s important to understand that it is necessary to have a controller card in your computer that supports a port multiplier or your motherboard has to support port multipliers and have the ability to connect the sata cable from the external enclosure to the computer’s motherboard. Here is an example of a PCI-Express controller card that supports port multipliers. All the cards that I looked at were PCI-Express so make sure that you have an open slot on your motherboard before buying. You can find external enclosures that work with USB but the transfer speed of USB is slower than SATA.

This is a Koutech IO-PESA220 PCI Express x 1 Low Profile Ready SATA II (3.0Gb/s) Controller Card. I found it at NewEgg for $29.99 USD with free shipping. It has a good rating. The Rosewill came with a card like this that can be used for external enclosures with port multipliers whether they are used for a RAID system or JBOD (just a bunch of disks) system. The JBOD system is what I use.

I am not endorsing this card as I have never owned one. I am just showing it as an example of a necessary item with external enclosures that have port multipliers.

A few weeks after installing the Rosewill external enclosure, I had the opportunity to install the RAID/Port Multiplier card that came with the enclosure.

Over the past few weeks, I have been copying CD’s containing many of my underwater images that I scanned from slides years ago. I am sure that I have a few thousand images on CD and I have been getting worried about the CD’s going bad. It is good that I started this as I have already found a half dozen disks that I can no longer read. I still have the original slides and I can rescan them but it will take a lot more time than copying them from a CD to a hard drive. I have also come to realize that I am going to have to add another trio of hard drives to my system to equalize my tiff files.

I went back to NewEgg and looked at the external enclosures. My Rosewill enclosure has been discontinued so I looked at other options. One of the reason that I love NewEgg so much is the customer comments and product ratings. I rely heavily on the opinions of people who actually have purchased the products and are using them.

I liked what I saw about a Sans Digital 4 Bay eSATA Port Multiplier JBOD Tower Storage Enclosure TR4M+BNC enclosure. It cost $104.00 USD with free shipping. I decided to give it a try. I ordered it along with a 2TB Hitachi hard drive. When it arrived, I was as pleased with the enclosure as I was with the Rosewill. This enclosure also is a tool less installation and has no internal cables to deal with like the Rosewill enclosure.

I installed the 2tb drive and attached the enclosure to the Rosewill RAID card. I ran into my first glitch. The drive in the enclosure was not recognized. The lights for power, computer connection and drive activity came on but the drive was not recognized by the computer. I tried restarting the computer and the Rosewill RAID bios recognized the drive but no-go with the computer. I thought that it might be a driver issue for the RAID card so I went to the Rosewill site and found a driver for Windows 7 for when the RAID card would be used with a JBOD system. I installed the driver in Device Manager, restarted the computer and all was well.

I am not ready for to rearrange my tiff files but I am going to wait until I purchase two more hard drives for the Sans Digital enclosure. My Addonics enclosure that failed sits on a shelf waiting to be used for spare parts for the one that is still working. If the Addonics enclosure fails, I know where I will be looking for a new external enclosure.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.

Courtesy of Business Stationery

I believe that anyone that uses Adobe Indesign will find this invaluable. A big thanks goes out to Anthony Houser once again. You can either click on the image above and print from the Wellsdrew web site or download the PDF file here.

© 2011, Herb Segars. All rights reserved.