Last week review 12-2026

This week was partly very sunny, but a bit cooler again despite the official start of spring 😉

This week’s topic was how to increase the capacity of an existing RAID 5 array by replacing the hard drives one by one. In my DXP 4800 Plus, it became necessary to replace the existing four terabyte drives with corresponding drives offering eight terabytes of capacity. This time, I used a method where each drive was marked as “degraded” or “disabled” in succession. The affected drive was then replaced with the larger one, and naturally, the RAID 5 array began rebuilding until it was complete. This process was repeated for all drives in the system, and with the last drive, the option to increase the RAID size was offered.

This worked very, very well. Of course, you have to be aware that this so-called RAID conversion takes quite a bit of time for a 4-terabyte drive, let alone one with 8 terabytes or even more capacity, and that it then has to be done across all the hard drives in the system. Nevertheless, I’m glad I did it, because now I have a RAID with 32 terabytes of capacity. That means one terabyte is now deducted for parity, leaving my computer with 24 terabytes.

So, what else happened this week? First, Adobe launched Firefly in a beta phase, which allows users to apply their own style to the generated videos. This means you’re no longer so dependent on entering all the details of a video via a prompt; Firefly can automatically generate certain design details based on the user’s specifications or style preferences. It remains to be seen how far this will go.

Then this week, Apple acquired the plugin developer Motion VFX. Motion VFX made a name for itself with various plugins for DaVinci Resolve. It remains to be seen whether these plugins will continue to be developed or perhaps only available for Adobe’s own program, Final Cut, in the future.

Finally, DxO also introduced the new PhotoLab version 9.6 this week, which naturally includes several improvements in noise reduction and is now supposed to deliver correct results for BSI and X-Trans sensors, especially those used in Fuji cameras.

All in all, another very eventful week. I hope you enjoyed the articles and look forward to your questions and comments.

ciao tuxoche