Harddrives for download abroad
- Thread starter arno
- Start date
arno said:
Well, I'm off to Delhi India on Saturday and looking into it I've decided to buy a small 2.5" external HDD and a battery pack to power it then get the HVX to off load to that. I can check that its all downloaded correctly via my powerbook. At the end of the day I'll dump all the days footage to a huge big f*ck off Lacie d2 drive. Anyway I'll report back on how this solution works in practice early next week
Indy.....
Eight hours is a huge amount of data. Depending on which mode you record in, you can accumulate up to 1GB per minute, so eight hours could turn into about half a terabyte of data.
There are external hard drives of that size, but then you'll be putting all of your eggs in one basket -- if the drive fails, you are SOL.
AMS has a RAID0/RAID1 capable external FW400/FW800 enclosure in their lineup. It uses drive caddies so that you can easily swap in drives if you need more capacity, or if one of the drives should fail -- the enclosure will rebuild a RAID1 array by itself without needing to be connected to a computer.
http://www.american-media.com/DS-2320DBK.pdf
I don't know if the power supply is an international one. Worst case you'll have to put a voltage transformer in front of it.
PS: I just checked, the PSU accepts 100-240V, 50-60Hz.
There are external hard drives of that size, but then you'll be putting all of your eggs in one basket -- if the drive fails, you are SOL.
AMS has a RAID0/RAID1 capable external FW400/FW800 enclosure in their lineup. It uses drive caddies so that you can easily swap in drives if you need more capacity, or if one of the drives should fail -- the enclosure will rebuild a RAID1 array by itself without needing to be connected to a computer.
http://www.american-media.com/DS-2320DBK.pdf
I don't know if the power supply is an international one. Worst case you'll have to put a voltage transformer in front of it.
PS: I just checked, the PSU accepts 100-240V, 50-60Hz.
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filmstox
Well-known member
I have the AMS unit, and it works great but I would not trust it's internal mirror. We ran into a situation where it rebuilt from the bad drive instead of the good one! We aborted the rebuild and didn't loose any footage but it was very scary. We hd to pull half of the footage from the primary and half from the secondary and we were OK. Now I just use it as a 2 slot JBOD and write to both drives using p2genie. You will need a PC to configure the raid controller since they don't have a mac config utility. Once it is configured though, it mounts to a mac without any hassle.
It's performance on FW400 isn't as good as a standard 400 drive but it screams at 800. AMS told us that the 400 port was not intended to be used for large transfers. I've never had a problem running it from the 800 though. Also be aware, the fan in the AMS is louder than my G5 tower. Not acceptable for on set use with sound recording.
Definately get a couple of extra trays and you'll be all set. The trays are a nice cable-less design that keeps the drives cool.
With all of the things I just mentioned, I still love the AMS.
-filmstox
It's performance on FW400 isn't as good as a standard 400 drive but it screams at 800. AMS told us that the 400 port was not intended to be used for large transfers. I've never had a problem running it from the 800 though. Also be aware, the fan in the AMS is louder than my G5 tower. Not acceptable for on set use with sound recording.
Definately get a couple of extra trays and you'll be all set. The trays are a nice cable-less design that keeps the drives cool.
With all of the things I just mentioned, I still love the AMS.
-filmstox
filmstox
Well-known member
It was our first shoot with the unit and we had a bad HDD. I owe the descovery to my business partner who has been a programmer and IT tech for a couple of decades. We noticed that the bad drive was acting odd, causing a reboot when formating ect. so we were keeping an eye on it. This was our first shoot with the HVX (actually one of the first HVX shoots ever, early January) and there was so much to figure out we just chalked the finicky drive up to juggling too much new hardware. My partner noticed that the drive was showing the error indictor on the GOOD drive and indicated that it was rebuilding. He just had a bad feeling about it and powered the unit down.
It turns out in conversations with AMS that you need to set the jumper on both drives to Master instead of the default Cable Select. This jumper setting led to the unit mis-identifying which drive was which.
I understand they have since added this setting to the documentation.
-filmstox
(You should have seen the looks on our faces as he and I realized that we might need to sell the company and move to Mexico! It was a great cardio workout though!)
It turns out in conversations with AMS that you need to set the jumper on both drives to Master instead of the default Cable Select. This jumper setting led to the unit mis-identifying which drive was which.
I understand they have since added this setting to the documentation.
-filmstox
(You should have seen the looks on our faces as he and I realized that we might need to sell the company and move to Mexico! It was a great cardio workout though!)