20/09/2026
For the stills techs.
My own cables are labelled. That label tells me what I wrote on it, not what the cable is doing today.
And on set, half the kit is not mine anyway. The client hands me a drive to copy to. The production has a cable in the box from the last job. An assistant borrows one and puts a different one back.
That is where the afternoon goes.
PortCheck keeps four things apart that normally get sold to you as one number. What the socket can do. Which cable is in it. What link the two of them agreed. What really moves through it.
Then it names the bottleneck in plain words. My G RAID sits on a socket rated 120 Gb/s, agreed at 40, and moves 204 MB/s. Socket fine. Cable fine. Link fine. The drive is just slow. Not a fault to chase on set, a fact to plan the day around.
The client’s drive. If it is Thunderbolt or NVMe, you see its hours, its error counts and its own verdict on its health before you copy a frame to it. Plenty of bus powered USB drives refuse to report that, and PortCheck says so rather than pretending. Either way you can measure what it really writes.
Somebody else’s cable. It reads the chip inside and ties it to the socket, so two identical black cables show as two different cables. The cheap ones carry no chip at all, which tells you something on its own.
Sockets. Some USB C sockets on a Mac are not Thunderbolt. Same connector, same look, and macOS says nothing. Mine measured 740 MB/s on the front and 3,611 MB/s on the back with the same drive.
Heat. Drive temperature live, with a history, so a drive creeping up in a closed case shows itself over days.
One click copies the lot as plain text for a producer who wants to know why the offload ran long.
I leave it open all day and glance at it between setups.
Ten pounds. One payment. Mac, Apple Silicon. No account, no telemetry, nothing leaves your machine.
Link in bio.
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