Anyone else limited by the 60Gb hard disk in the Panasonic AJ-PCS060G P2 store?

C

ctncomms

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We are getting about 15mins of footage on each P2 card, and P2 workflow is suffering because we're having to use laptops in the field to transfer to non-resilient disks, albeit ruggeds. I'm looking at buying this unit (http://catalog2.panasonic.com/webap...logId=13051&itemId=94262&surfModel=AJ-PCS060G) to solve the problem in part, but the 60Gb drive is so small. There are 64Gb cards on the market anyway!

I worked out that this would allow for about 2 hours of footage to be stored, depending on the format. For the outlay it's just not worth it.

Form the specs it looks like it just has one drive in it. Apart from the obvious things like voiding the warranty, etc, has anyone thought of putting a new drive in this thing? The largest Barracuda drive (1.5TB) is only about £85.

An alternative (and somewhat less risky) option is to look at similar devices - but I can't find any. Panasonic have called this thing a 'store', if that's the nomenclature than there doesn't seem to be anything else at all.

Producers are looking to be out in field for 5 days at a time, looking to safely store dozens if not hundreds of hours of footage. Apart from building a shuttle PC with a RAID in it and some pico ATX board, how on earth does this seemingly usual demand get met?

Any advice or help much appreciated

George
 
The PCS060G P2 Store is pretty much obsolete now. People have talked about upgrading the drive but a) I don't think it's possible, and b) in any case, nobody's ever done it.

A Windows laptop is the cheap/easy/convenient field offloading device.

If you want to go with the P2 Store's successor, look at the HPG20 P2 Portable. It does everything the P2 Store did, plus it has a screen, it can offload to external cheap USB hard disks, it's an HD-SDI recorder, and lots more.
 
Barry, just to continue the thread: I am also at a point where I need to go beyond my simple storage form the HVX-200 in the field with my two P2 cards. Typically, I've used the Duel adaptor and the P2CMS offload program from Panasonic with the MacBook Pro, but it seems very vulnerable in uncontrolled situations. I don't really want to invest now in a Firestore or the Panasonic device -- just too costly. How do you use a Windows laptop?
 
I've used three different windows laptops with P2 so far, and they're all bulletproof. Pick up a windows laptop that has a PCMCIA CardBus slot on it -- do *not* go for an ExpressCard laptop or you'll be in the same Duel boat.

Offload to the internal drive, but if you're intending to use the footage on a Mac, offload to an external drive too, either USB or, if your laptop supports it, firewire. Then just unplug that drive and plug it into your Mac and -- you're done.

Alternatively, if your laptop has a gigabit ethernet port, you can use it as a slot reader networked to your desktop Mac.
 
I use P2 Viewer. P2 Viewer isn't available by itself on the Mac, so that's why for Mac users I say to use P2CMS.
 
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I've been trying to find this answer on the Panasonic site without luck (yet) so I though maybe I'd try here in case someone knows off the top of their head. I have a PCS060G and just got a 32GB P2 card. The 60G doesn't seem to like the 32GB card now that I'm trying to copy files to it. [Specifically, I get an error message E3. Smaller cards copied OK.]

Does the PCS060G need to be updated somehow to handle the larger cards? Thanks.

EDIT: I may have just found my answer. I haven't used this for a while and I think I need to download the P2 Store Manager program to my latest Mac and then check for software updates for the unit.
 
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Barry, I have dusted off my old Dell Inspiron 700m -- a tiny workhorse with a 12 inch screen AND a PCMCIA slot. How nice! Never thought of thisuntil I read your post.
Now, have you connected your Windows laptop with an ethernet cable to your MacBook Pro? How is it configured machine to machine to create the "card reader." It would be nice to offload directly into the MacBook Pro (or the external drives connected to it) using Shotput or P2CMS.
 
The HPG20 P2 was a bit pricey, so I've sent them off with a laptop now - but bought this drive: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Western-Digital-Mirror-dual-drive-storage/dp/B001BKZWBA

...and set it to RAID-1.

Since the beginning on this year, I have seen no fewer than FOUR of these drives (we only had five) fail. I think it's pretty bad that the likes of Seagate, Maxtor etc can sell these external drives which are 2 drives in a striped (RAID-0) configuration, *doubling* the chanc of data loss.

This WD one is exactly the same except that it has a configurator which allows you to set it to mirror across the two drives instead. OK, so you only get half of the space, but I now have much more confidence about the safety of the media between the field and the asset management system.

RE P2 readers, I don't know if this helps anyone at all but I was looking for a desktop version that would go into a floppy drive enclosure. I found this: http://www.amtron.com/reader/pcdtp110cs.htm which works really well. Crucially it's the 32-bit support that is needed for P2 throughput.

I'm using the Amberfin free MXF viewer just for checking files have copied. Until this morning I couldn't get the P2 Viewer from Panasonic working because the AV Intra codec accompanying package wasn't installed. Incidentally, speaking to a retailer for the HPG20 P2 they said that the current revision *also* doesn't support this codec which is required for some HD codec (forgive my ignorance) that the production people need. A new one is "just" out, apparently.
 
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