Rev Drives

M

Mark Smith

Veteran
I've been using 70 GB rev drives as back up for my captured media. What is nice is that a full P2 store fits nicely onto 1 rev cartridge, and I throw the thing on the shelf until I don't need it any more, then re use it.

I ran a test with Xbench the other day to compare the rev drive to a OWC pocket fire wire drive I also use for the same purpose. What was interesting is that the Rev drive was faster on USB 2 than the pocket drive was on fire wire or USB 2. Specifically read speeds off the Rev were 20% faster than the F_W drive while write speeds were about the same.

I was kind of surprised by the results. Another nice aspect of the rev drive is if you use the UFD formatted disks , they can be read by either a mac or pc. A pc will read them right off the bat, a mac needs to have the rev driver installed, which is not a big deal, considering the interoperability that is gained between the 2 platforms.
 
I personally find the Rev drives very expensive by comparison to a loss-leader hard drive which you can find at Fry's, CompUSA, etc etc. I archive to these "loss leader" drives and use a Wiebetech DriveDock, a nifty little device that will give you Firewire 400/800. USB 2, SATA (whatever config you buy) connectivity between bare drive and your machine. Archive to the bare drive and then put the drive back into its anti-static bag and store on your shelf or in your vault. Lately, Fry's has been selling 750 gb Seagates for $329-349 and last week had 400 gb Seagates for $149. I think that's a lot more economical than the Rev.

As far as formats, I format everything Mac HFS+ and have MacDrive on my XP bootcamp partition. MacDrive will allow an XP machine to see and write to Mac drive without the 4gb file limit of Fat32 or the Mac's inability to write to NTFS.

Ned Soltz
 
Sounds like you have a plan and it works. I needed something small for travel and something that would play well with windows and Mac. I have my own FCP set up but sometimes I work for people that are editing on PC based avids and the Rev drive handles that situation. It is also cleaner in a way to archive my stuff to Rev as often times the project MXF files weigh in at less than 65 gb so that will fit on a cartridge and then I can easliy identify the volume on the shelf.

If a drive mechanism fails, I still have the media on a separate thing and could replace the drive part of the system, where as with a hard drive if the mechanism fails, one might be screwed. If I was doing vast volumes of MXF files I'd probably look at the big fat hard drive(s) solution that you use. For now I like this way of doing it because it gives me better control over the info. I can keep multiple projects backed up and separate from each other, so if I do have to provide back up files to a client, I can give them theirs alone, with out having to give them a Large hard drive that may have shoot files from a variety of clients saved to it.
 
I have had no problems whatsoever. I will be installing DVRack HD on the XP partition and attempting to capture from the HVX to the Mac drive. So far, I have had no problems reading MXF files on the Mac drive with the PC P2 reader and in fact it read some of the clips that FCP reported as damaged.

Ned
 
If you're looking for the devil's advocate on Rev Drives, you found him. We bought 6 of the 70GB Rev Drives for our editors and designers at our office. More than half of us have had problems -- one has filled 10x 70GB Rev disks with data, though only 8 of the drives were able to retrieve the data. On my system, after working fine for a few weeks, now hooking up the Rev crashes my finder when I copy anything or even just empty the trash.

Needless to say, we're regretting those $500 purchases right about now.

Good luck.
 
Ned,
The Weibetech drive docks look interesting, but the ones I saw didn't attach via SATA external cables and it seemed like you needed a different adapter for SATA drives vs. IDE. Do you have something that is more universal.
Also are there any dangers to using drives bare like that?

- Lenny Levy
 
David has posted a link above.

I would not work with bare drives as a routine drive. However, placing the drive on a hard surface and making certain not to work up a charge of static electricity before touching it allows enough margin of safety to use the bare drive just for archival purposes. Then, put it back in its anti-static bag.

Ned
 
David S. said:
$400.00 for the drive, and $50.00 for 35 Gb disks.

Bare 80 GB IDE or SATA drives run $50.00 at zipzoomfly:


I'm Buying 70 gig disks in 4 packs for about $218 as I recall. Shop it!
Click to expand...
 
I only have one drive mechanism, but I certainly have 11 disks on the shelf and they all work perfectly. I'd go back to Iomega and complain if I were you. Mine works well with PC or Mac
 
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