Terabyte drive

Bus No. 8

Bus No. 8

Well-known member
I'm looking to buy a 1 TB drive as I get further into capturing and assembling 25+ hours of footage on our documentary (with much more to come, eventually).

I was thinking about the Maxtor, http://www.maxtorsolutions.com/en/catalog/OTIII_Turbo/

but a friend had this to say about that, "I actually would recommend strongly NOT buying a device to stripe into the 1TB size and instead purchase two separate 500GB drives. The problem with RAID 0 is that if one drive dies, you lose the data on both since the data is written 1/2 to each drive".

Just wondering what people think about that, and what recommendations you might have. My 300gb Maxtor is just about tapped out, so I'll be in the market soon.

Thanks.
 
for what its worth I agree with your buddy. for 2 reasons.

1) I had an IDE raid for a while 0 striped for performance. it was blazing fast, but it did ultimately die on me after a couple of years and I did lose data. one drive failed, but all data was lost.

2) the next issue is that the introduction of SATA2 drives with 3GB throughput makes the need for performance raids "not an issue" for video editing. I put that in quotes because ppl will disagree on that, but I'll say that the speed on those drives should be adequate for your needs.

I don't have anywhere near your amount of footage, but my 30 minute film with a ton of special effects totals nearly 300 GB. I had everything on a 300 gb sata2 drive and just added another 500 GB drive to stuff over to.

let me know what you end up doing!!
 
btw, i use this free program called SyncBack to sync my working drive with my external backup hard disk. it's easy to set up and brings HUGE peace of mind to priceless projects that you pour your heart and soul into!!!
 
Thanks, Mark - good advice, and good to know about the SATA2 drives. Of course I want blazing fast performance, but I want to not lose my work even more.

I'm leaning towards two 600gb drives at the moment. Any suggestions on the best ones to get?
 
Bus No. 8 said:
Any suggestions on the best ones to get?
Click to expand...

hey bus,
I don't know enough to recommend. i have sata2 drives from Western digital and Maxtor i think. haven't had any issues yet and both have had great speed performance so far. these SATA drives do run hot tho, so make sure your fans are good- i go one extra step of making sure they're separated in my case by an empty hd slot...
mc
 
drpaluga said:
maxtor better than western digital. i had probs with wd and my g4.
Click to expand...

I'm the opposite, I've had 2 maxtors crap out on me in the last 5 years and have had 0 problems with my 5 WD's.
 
Thanks everyone. I'm still doing the research. I currently own both a Western Digital and a Maxtor. Both have worked great for me. My main concern at the moment is to find adequate external storage for 25+ hours of footage. I'll let you know what I settle on.
 
all drives can and do fail - you need to create a robust work env.

If you want a 1TB drive then construct a workflow that will allow that - where is your master footage - if it is on tape - then you can always recapture which means all you need to backup is timelines - so get a 1TB drive and a small backup drive (or backup timelines to dvd)

if your master is digital then you need a different setup - perhaps a raid 5 swappable will work - unless the entire unit fries. in which case 2 separate synced drives will work.

Why are you looking for raid 0 performance - certainly is not needed for any sort of SD editing unless you are compositing many streams

my point ultimately is - it all depends on your needs, what you have and what you can afford.
 
My master footage is on tape.

I'm not looking for a raid 0 set-up at this point. I'm simply looking for adequate storage to have the bulk of my footage captured and on hand.

So right now I'm looking at two 600GB drives for storage and, as you suggested - project timeline back-up, which I'll probably just back up on DVDs.
 
I just have a backup utilty for everything that's not on tapes (I exlude the capture folders)
so if I lose my RAID 0 drives all I need to do is recapture (my current project has 50 hours of footage, so it's not a perfect solution)
next time I upgrade my storage I'm getting 3-4 drives for RAID 5 or 10 which will give me the performance and peace of mind
 
My Friend recently bought two 1TB drives. One for storage and one as a backup. He lost everything he had, including 40+ tapes for a documentry that he now has to recapture. Its not a bad idea if you have a ton of footage to get a backup.
 
Well, I just bought a Maxtor 750gb, 800 firewire drive. I do wish that I had another drive of equal size for backup, but that's not quite in the budget at the moment. I haven't had a chance to fire it up yet (we had flooding and high winds and trees falling in Seattle last night, so I unplugged all the computers), but I'll report back on how it's working out for me.
 
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