Lacie pocket raid.. HVX capturing in the field made easy

dvInsight said:
[...] BE PARANOID and BACK UP OFTEN. Because stuff fails, falls and farts in real life all the time.
Click to expand...
Wise words, I'd add MIRROR THE CRITICAL STUFF, since these days drives are so cheap, it's folly not to take advantage of things like RAID-1 mirrored pairs to reduce the impact of drive failure.

I've recently had a 250GB external FireWire 800 drive with 10 hours of video become corrupted and I did not freak out a bit, since it was part of a RAID-1 mirror pair, I simply replaced the drive with a fresh one and rebuilt the pair. Things break, that's the nature of electro-mechanical devices, that's why drive manufacturers quote MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) numbers, they are telling you they know it will fail at some point... there's always a statistical probability of data loss due to catastrophic hardware disk failure or corrupted disk structures. If you live with that as a fact of life, you'll never stress when a disk becomes corrupted or hardware fails. I work with this rule: design your workflow in such a way that you can pull any single disk out of the system and the work can continue without missing a beat. With drive prices as low as they are these days, there's no need to have a delicate electro-mechanical device like a hard drive be the weakest link of the chain. This is why RAID-0 for capture/storage makes me nervous.
 
Alas,

Yes. I should have said that Raid 1 Rules! for all the reasons David mentioned. A great solution is always have 2 sets of Raid Level 1 systems ready to go at all times and a second lowend laptop to do a rebuild with if disaster strikes.

The funny thing is, is that when you have this solution at the ready, then disaster never seems to strike. It's only when you have non-redundent systems that things get wonky.

--
Rob
 
LaCie Drives WILL FAIL you. I had one crap out on me and I had to reload all the footage. My friend had his Extreme drive crap out on him and he spent a 4 days reloading all the footage and relinking all the media. We cracked one open to discover that they use Western Digital internal drives, the crappiest drives on the planet.....I couldn't imagine trusting it for my HVX files.. Not worth the money.. I use G-Tech drives .
 
Last edited:
I love western digital drives.... they're workhorses.

Seagates are second.

Maxtors crap out the most .... but usually well within the warrantee period.
 
pkendall said:
[...] Western Digital internal drives, the crappiest drives on the planet [...]
Click to expand...
Do you have specific, factual evidence? I find it hard to believe this claim, I've been using Western Digital drives for many years in many different systems (including several in my NAS server that has run 24/7 for years) without a single hardware failure. All drives are prone to failure, though some are better than others. Western Digital is far from the worst according to most reports I've read, in addition to my own experience.
 
Last edited:
pkendall said:
[...] I use G-Tech drives.
Click to expand...
And what drive mechanisms they do they use internally? They don't make their own mechanisms, so they have to purchase them from comanies like Samsung, Hitachi, Western Digital, Maxtor, Seagate, etc. Don't get me wrong, I think G-Tech sells a fine product, but in many respects, data integrity is really "in the hands of" the drive mechanisms themselves.
 
stabwound said:
I love western digital drives.... they're workhorses.

Seagates are second.

Maxtors crap out the most .... but usually well within the warrantee period.
Click to expand...

I totally agree with this statement.... my western digital drives have never failed me... but I really think Maxtor is crap - I have had so many problems with that brand over the years
 
I don't trust any drives!!! LOL!!!

For every work drive I buy, I buy a second one that clones the master drive every morning.

Sometimes we forget how amazingly fragile this technology is - billions of bits spinning around at thousands of revolutions per second....

Same with computers...

Same with the human body...

(i'm not saying I am cloning humans that I work with though!)
 
cinemakinoeye said:
Do you have specific, factual evidence?
Click to expand...
how about the fact that they are always the cheapest drives in the store.. way cheaper than anything else.. u get what u pay for. the other fact is that they are used in LaCie enclosures.. they always crash and burn.

G-Tech was started up by Medea engineers. After my lacie decided to take a vaction, I went out to the G-Tech office and got my self a G-RAID...I've never had a problem with my G-RAID.
 
G-tech is a no brainer.. top notch company, top notch products. the new quad interfaces are killer.
 
pkendall said:
how about the fact that they are always the cheapest drives in the store.. way cheaper than anything else.. u get what u pay for. .
Click to expand...

Hard drives are always in a downward price spiral. Drive manufacturers are in locked in competition for market share... so prices do not indicate quality at all.

Sometimes a newer, bigger drive with more cache can actually be similarly priced (or even cheaper than!!) a drive that's been in the market for for even a couple of months.

http://www.anitec.ca/subcategory/108/hard_drives/

Notice that:

WD 250 gig 8m cache SATA = $89.95
WD 250 gig 8m cache IDE = $95.95
WD 200 gig 8m cache SATA = $105.95

What's going on here?? The lousiest drive is the most expensive... this is madness.

Obviously, if you believe the dictum, "you get what you pay for", then you'd make the wrong choice. Computer equiptment is one area where this dictum does not apply.

Buying hard drives require up-to-date research... the market is absolutely screwy.... the rules for buying changes all the time.

Some years ago my roomate asked me to buy him a drive.... "Get me the cheapest drive the store has...."

I tried to explain to him that that case, cheapest was not the best, in terms of bang for the buck. He shut me up and sent me to the store to pick up the cheapest. He got a 40 gig hard drive (5400 rpm) for $80.

After the drive was installed, I told him.... "ya know, the 80 gig drive (7200 rpm)(same manufacturer) was only a buck more.
 
Regarding Western Digital Drives,
pkendall said:
[...] how about the fact that they are always the cheapest drives in the store.. way cheaper than anything else.. u get what u pay for. the other fact is that they are used in LaCie enclosures.. they always crash and burn.
Click to expand...
Reality check: LaCie uses drives from a variety of drive manufacturers. Here's some empirical evidence: right now I've got four 250GB LaCie d2 drives connected to my G5 and I can check the manufacturer of the drive mechanism in each system, here goes, hmm, interesting, two of them have Maxtor mechanisms, one has a Western Digital mechanism, and the fourth has a Seagate mechanism. So yes, Western Digital mechanisms are used in LaCie drives, but so are Maxtor, Seagate, and I would assume others too.

In an external hard drive system there are three primary sources of hardware system failure: (1) the drive mechanism itself, (2) the interface between the drive and the external connector (somtimes this includes an interface bridge, e.g. ATA-USB), and (3) the power supply.

It is my opinion that one problem with the LaCie d2 drives is they run too hot, especially when they are stacked. These units don't have a fan, but upon internal inspection I see there's space for a fan (I assume an earlier design had a fan, there's an attachment point and space for one inside the case), this will, most certainly, shorten the life of the mechanism and the interface electronics. LaCie claims that the aluminum case acts as a heat sink. I'd still feel better if they had a fan. It is not my intention to bash LaCie here, just sharing my observation.

I posted my opinion of Western Digital mechanisms earlier in the thread, no need to for me to go there again.
 
Last edited:
I thought the HVX200 did not provide the power to run a bus powered hard drive.
Are you using the USB or Firewire port on the HVX to connect a bus powered hard drive to transfer the data from the P2?
 
fiercecurry said:
I thought the HVX200 did not provide the power to run a bus powered hard drive
Click to expand...
That's correct.

fiercecurry said:
IAre you using the USB or Firewire port on the HVX to connect a bus powered hard drive to transfer the data from the P2?
Click to expand...
Given the above, this is impossible, the drive needs some external power source.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top