Okay. What are we looking at for hard drives?

Spending $190 for every 2 hours of footage will break the bank for many. Maybe purchasing some extremely cheap internal ATA drives just for storage purposes would be better. There's a great device by BYTECC that is simply a cable that connects ATA drives to your USB 2.0 port with no enclosure. You can store the drive in its anti static sleeve and keep it in the box.
Click to expand...

Yes, that's just me. My computer is built into my desk and getting at the drive bays is an all day ordeal. When I do it, I'm adding a new boot drive and pulling two of my hot 10K SCSI drives and putting those into an external box.

I'm hoping that when blue Ray hits it works for the long haul.
 
this might be stupid question but why can't you store data on DV tapes? I'm not talking HD video, but the data files... like a DLT. i know these recorders don't exist, but I just want to know if this is this even possible?
 
There are software that allows for that. The problem I see is that converting/downconverting and acessing the footage is a very painstakng slow procedure. I'd say we need faster acess.
 
MacGurus have a pretty good guide for setting up a SATA Raid. I'm thinking about purchasing a fourbay case, stocking it with 250 gig Seagates. This would be for working with/ editing the HD footage.

Secondly, I'd purchase a single sata hard drive enclosure for around $50 and swap in SATA drives for backup. Once one drive is full with the media files, bag it and print out a sheet with the contents.

With a 250 gig HD at $80 from Tiger Direct, shooting 1080 HD at 1 gig per minute comes out to roughly $20 an hour. 720p would be less than $10 an hour.
 
I would not use a Lacie. I have a few and the power connector fails intermittently on all of them after a few months of use
 
I got to second what SalaTar has said. I have a firend that works for CBN and he has had alot of problems with the Lacie drives dying.
 
Hopefully NAB will present some archiving options for HD users on a budget. I don't see any decent options right now except spending a lot of money on external hard drives and a butt load of DVD-Rs.
 
Geoff_R said:
With a 250 gig HD at $80 from Tiger Direct, shooting 1080 HD at 1 gig per minute comes out to roughly $20 an hour. 720p would be less than $10 an hour.
Click to expand...

That's a good deal, as HDCAM tape is roughly $1/1m which is $60 per hour (DVCPRO-HD is ~$80/64m). So if you're looking to archive footage at HDCAM/DVCPRO-HD quality you should expect to pay at least what you would have if you brought & stored to tape. Which means if I can find a archive solution that allows me to archive 1080 at a rate less than $60-80/hr I'm shooting par.
 
With exponential tech growth; I'm hoping we get 1 to 2 TB SATA hard drives in a good year/year and a half... *fingers crossed*
 
I am ordering the Granite 8 drive hot swappable rack $700.00
8- Seagate 500GB drives $295.00 each = $2360.00
Sonnet Tempo-X eSATA 8 SATA Card 263.00
8- 6' eSata cables $30.00 each $240.00
Total $3563.00
This gets me a virtually silent running hot swap 4 TB external drive bay

http://granitedigital.com/catalog/pg61_alumhotswap2-4-8rack.htm

The Granite unit is expected to start shipping in a week or two. I will be selling them on my website at a discount shortly.
 
pkendall said:
this might be stupid question but why can't you store data on DV tapes? I'm not talking HD video, but the data files... like a DLT. i know these recorders don't exist, but I just want to know if this is this even possible?
Click to expand...

Apparently, it is possible, pkendall.

http://www.download.com/DV-Backup/3000-2232_4-10301118.html?tag=lst-0-1

Never tried it, but it's a cheap program for only $50. I guess the downside would be that it is proprietary and thus decreases it's usability for long term archival capabilities. But for now, it would a very cheap alternative for someone running a small studio setup.

Garrett
 
I have already bought a 5 HD SATA II Port Multiplier Enclosure with 5 300GB seagate drives. I have a Sonnet E4P SATA card that lets me have up to 4 different 5 bay enclosures at one time. I just ordered another enclosure and 5 more 400GB seagate drives. These enclosures get more than 200MB/s read/write sustained speed. I will be getting more 300GB SATA drives to stick in one of the enclosures and backup all my footage from the other enclosure, and then stick the drives back into a static bag and have them stored in another location. When i stick the backup drives in the enclosure i will be formating them as separate drives each, not a raid. This method seems like the fast and most cost effective way. 300GB drives are about $128. Here are some links of where i ordered my stuff. I use final cut 5.1 on a G5 quad, if people are wondering.

http://www.macgurus.com/productpages/sata/Tempo-E4P.php

http://www.cooldrives.com/firemorasaii.html

http://www.computergiants.com/items/get_mfgr.asp?subcatid=830&catid=5&mfgrid=2&subsubcatid=2407

Ben
 
2 firewire 800 500GB Drives?

2 firewire 800 500GB Drives?

Perhaps those more knowledgeable than I will be kind enough to tell me if they see any problem with me using 2 500 GB firewire 800 drives to store my feature...

100 minute final cut
10/1 shooting ratio= 1000 minutes
720 24p DVCPRO HD= 0.5 gb/minute
0.5 gb x 1000= 500 gb
One 500 gb drive for editing and one for back-up...

Make sense?

If so, which drives would you recommend?
 
Cammer,

I think that would be fine. Though I own this camera and way too many accessories for it, I am an editor by profession and have been for 27 years or so. I think I've used nearly every form of drive to come along and now use SATA raids, Ultra SCSSI and Firewire in the field to dump from P2 and now my Firestore. The FW800 technology works just fine. The through-put is more than adequate and if your feature is not overly effects heavy, they'll be fine for your project. I also do not like the LaCie drives anymore. Lots of problems. Seagate makes a very reliable product as does Maxtor (the same company now). I suggest a 7200 rpm drive with 16 MB of cache. You'll find the higher cache the better it will play longer sequences like yours. If you don't already own the firewires, I'd look into SATA drives. They're super fast and cheap and there are many companies who offer them. Stay with the reliable ones like Segate, Hitachi etc but stay away from Western Digital......

Don Wilson
AmericanaMediaInc.com
 
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