How are you going to use your HVX?

[Ralph Oshiro]

Most people who bought these from me mount them on their belt in a pouch or attached to the tripod in a lightmeter's hard-sided leather holster.

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. I move far too quickly to be "tethered" that way to the storage device. Having a cable attached to my camera would slow me down a significant amount since I rarely would hire an assistant camera for my personal project shoots. The way I shot my short for the zombie contest is a perfect example. I would move from sticks, to dolly, to Steadicam, to handheld bracket in SECONDS. Every camera support I own has a Stroboframe quick-release receiver, and every camera I own (two 35mm SLRs, DSLRs, multiple 3CCD video cameras) has the same Stroboframe plate. I think I own about $700-worth of Stroboframe quick-release plate/receivers.

 

[Rush]

well, it doesn´t need to be lacie. any "cheap" harddisk will do.

Problem is, how to hook it up to the computer. RAID arrays are more expensive due to the controller card, housing, fans, cabling, drives, programming and setup. And you still have to buy a SATA or SCSI card for the computer with external hookup. Cheapest external storage per GB I've seen has been firewire storage, of which the most popular is Lacie.

For me, I have found the cheapest solution is to simply setup a cheap Windows machine in a tall tower case (8 expansion bays), with 8 SATA Seagate drives, each 400GB, running Raid 1 mirror for redundancy or Raid 0 for capacity and speed. Gives you 1.6TB redundant storage, or 3.2TB Raid 0 fast storage, at a super low cost. Need more space? By the time you run out, you can one more tower with double the capacity for half the price. You dump your footage from your editing computer through 1000mbps LAN or 400mbps 1394.

$520 for the tower, Motherboard, CPU, System HDD, CD Drive, and basic 512MB RAM. Most good boards now come with 4 SATA II channels, each running 2 drives, like this one (5 star rating at Newegg):
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131517

8 Seagate SATA drives at $247/ea. ($1482 total). These have NCQ, which gives SCSI-like performance at 7200RPM:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148063

Now you got 3.2TB of storage for $2000, which is $0.62/GB. That will be $0.50/GB in 9 months. It's a bit work, but when money is tight, every penny counts. :thumbsup:

 

[thisiswells]

It'd be kinda cool to just have a tall metal cheese plate under the camera

hahaha.. he said, "cheese plate" :cheesy::grin:

as for the raid strategy... well, dang you're on the ball. makes sense to me. Slowly, I've been transferring all my good tapes over to disk, with the eventual goal of throwing away the tapes. I've got more external hard drives than I can handle at the moment and am running out of space. You know, a few years ago a terabyte sounded like A LOT of space... Today, a terabyte costs about five hundred bucks. (250GBX4, $118each) :thumbup:

 

[Rush]

Did I screw that up :grin: Man was I tired last night, er this morning.

Yeah I mean this is just one computer unit, totally self-suffcient, for $2000 with 3.2TB on it. You can even edit basic DV on it :thumbsup: