Okay. What are we looking at for hard drives?

BigMike

BigMike

Well-known member
I'm looking at the new Firewire 800 G-Tech GRAID PRO, which is taking preorders for there 5/1.25TB RAID 3 for under 2,000 bucks. They will soon have a 2.5 TB option, too, for under $4,000. These drives claim to sustain up to 3 streams of DVCPRO HD.

When I first started looking, I was certain that I was going to need 4TB, preferably with RAID 3 or RAID 5 protection. That's $10,000 and up. These drives can do upwards of 300Mb/s sustained rates.

Since DVCPRO HD is, at 1080i, only a little more than a Gig a minute do we need such extreme drives?

All I know is that I'm staying away from RAID 0 systems because once one drive fails, you lose ALL your data. Give me protection and a slower speed any day of the week.

Since I'm a PC user and may use RAYLIGHT or one of the other options, I am unclear whether they convert the files to something larger. Raylight makes an AVI out of the files. How big are these files? I'll be asking that on a Raylight thread.

Since new products are coming out, I'm wondering what you folks are planning to do for storage?

What are you folks planning to use?
 
I am probably going to be purchasing a LaCie Big Disk, either the 1 TB or 1.2 TB model. I believe they offer options other than RAID 0 but I will most likely use the RAID 0 setup. Though I am worried about losing the footage, I am going to take other actions to preserve the data.

I might just burn all the Media files to DVD but this would suck up lots of free time. My other and more likely course of action is to set up one external SATA drive and buy a few 250 gig hard drives. As files migrate to the LaCie from production, I'll be making secondary backups on the external SATA. Once a drive is full, I'll swap in the next 250.

I haven't yet done a cost analysis on this process and before making a final decision, I'll weigh some other options including a GRAID.

I agree that no matter what, you have to backup the data somewhere. Just running a large RAID 0 with no recourse to retrieve your data in the event of a failure is too risky.
 
Geoff_R said:
I agree that no matter what, you have to backup the data somewhere. Just running a large RAID 0 with no recourse to retrieve your data in the event of a failure is too risky.
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Besides, you have to keep your footage even after you finised the job...
 
taubkin said:
Besides, you have to keep your footage even after you finised the job...
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Yep I would charge the client though. I have a retention policy of 1 month and if they would like me to keep the project I charge $200-$250 a year. That's enough to buy 2 250 GB Hd's 1 for the data and the other as a backup. Now if I want to keep the footage that's up to me and if they do want some more work with the project and I still have the files even though they didn't pay I will charge them for the time it will take to do the project again
 
Dusterdoo,

Bookmarked that, Thanks!

When are you planning to set this up? Can you post some info, perhaps even pictures when you get around to doing this?
 
Yikes.

Yikes.

This is a very interesting thread. I've been so caught up in reading about the HVX itself that I overlooked what a pain it's going to be to back up large projects. I suppose this is where HDV is really going to shine. Shoot on a $3 tape, back it up on a $3 tape. Shoot on P2, back it up on... hard drives?
 
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HowdyDoo said:
Shoot on a $3 tape, back it up on a $3 tape. Shoot on P2, back it up on... hard drives?
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I'm expecting the the BluRay or Hi Def DVDs coming out will my my choice for archiving.

Most likely I'll shoot for a day, put the footage on the computer and before I call it quits for the day, burn a DVD of that day's shoot.
 
The problem with the DVD archive is that DVD-R is a terrible medium. As the discs get old, the readers stop recognizing them. I have some unreadable DVD-R's that I recorded 2 years ago...

I hope that's not the case with Blue-Ray.

But I wonder what the people that are already working the HVX doing, like Barry and Jarred...
 
I know the point of P2 is to remain tapeless, but it seems to me that if Panasonic would release an affordable DVCPro HD deck, that would help a lot of people out. I would have no problem archiving to tape. I'm really only interested in P2 for skipping the capture process during the initial production. This archiving issue is a big deal to me simply because I run a very, very small post house. I try to get by barebones. P2 really doesn't save much money in the long run if you have to keep buying hard drives for back up.
 
HowdyDoo said:
I know the point of P2 is to remain tapeless, but it seems to me that if Panasonic would release an affordable DVCPro HD deck, that would help a lot of people out. I would have no problem archiving to tape. I'm really only interested in P2 for skipping the capture process during the initial production.
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I have often wished they would make an archival DVCPRO HD deck as well. Is that even possible? Something beastly slow and cheap?

(Oh, and I want a $2000.00 Corvette that goes 0-60 is three seconds and gets 75mpg.)
 
lpcvideo1 said:
I have often wished they would make an archival DVCPRO HD deck as well. Is that even possible? Something beastly slow and cheap?

(Oh, and I want a $2000.00 Corvette that goes 0-60 is three seconds and gets 75mpg.)
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How about cheap one time use 128gig P2 cards? :D
 
Yes.

Yes.

Or some sort of compact, sub $1000 machine that records to HD & Beta, burns DVDs, processes 35mm prints, and grants wishes.
 
I agree about the DVD longevity and the corvette for 2,000 bucks.

You can store to hard drives, but bearing wear out, put it too close to a magnet and the drive is corrupted...

Maybe we can get some blue line paper and hand write all the ones and zeros? Tangivle, but not feasable.

Hard drives will do for now. If the Blue Ray pans out, it will be a good solution. Maybe you will have to schedule an annual disk copy to a new DVD-R.
 
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