The crazy price of storage!

paulears

paulears

Veteran
I'm interested in what you all do for storage and backup. I shoot on Cfast 2 cards and the high speed SD cards in my Ursas. The edit computer has an internal 8Tb drive and a 4Tb internal drive. Shorter projects go on the smaller one, and theatre shows go onto the larger one but once they are complete, the older ones get transferred to an external 16Tb for archive, once I don't need to return to them. I've got a reasonably good housekeeping system where I tend to keep half a dozen shorter projects inside the machine so commonly reused files like titles and backgrounds can be easily copied to the new projects. This week I was editing a 4 camera live switched and streamed project. This I do by taking the switched recording on my blackmagic hyperdeck hard drives into the edit in Premier, and then I use a wide safety shot not switched live, just recorded, as fill material when I cut to a camera that suddenly moved, or I cut to the wrong camera - that kind of thing. The wide material covering up the bad switches, or occasional camera cock up. However, I also take the cards from the Ursa's and can use that camera ISO for better shots I missed live. Shows are typically 2 x 45 mins or 2 x 60 mins - so the amount of storage for a project is going up and up. I tried to order another 16Tb hard drive and discovered that in 8 months, the price is 5 times what it was just before Christmas when I bought the last one. 16Tb is between 400 and 500 pounds for the Seagates I have always used. Everyone is blaming AI data centres, but surely there must be other reasons why mechanical and solid state memory are now ridiculously priced.

My usual reliable but cheap companies are all at the daft prices. Just makes no sense. I thought about buying 1Tb ones and just living with lots, but that's not very practical. What is happening? I'm seriously considering going back to 1080 from 4K, jus form storage reasons.
 
AI data centers have taken all of the memory manufacturer's attention. Due to AI's needs for higher performance memory, it brings higher profits. So fabrication lines are being switched over to meet data center needs and profits. The lower availability of fabrication lines for consumer computer memory has put the supply far below demand and thus, a corresponding hike in prices. Estimates are that price relief will not come until 2027 or 2028.
 
It’s absolutely because of AI data centers. And it’s ridiculous. In less than 6 months, a 4TB Samsung T7 went from about $230 to over $1000. Those are the drives that I use for Pro Tools sessions and for backing up production sound.

I need to upgrade my video editing storage, and I’m looking closely at the Samsung Pro-Blade Station and Pro Blade SSD mags. I know a few video editors who swear by them. The blades are also swappable. Still not the cheapest option, but seems to be one of the more affordable solutions under current circumstances.
 
There are only 3 companies that manufacture ram/ssd they colluded to cut production of consumer ram/ssd so it would cause a shortage and drive up prices and switched part of the production to more profitable ai data center applications that use different designs.

I believe the high prices and shortages pushed a surge of buyers for spinner hard drives which in turn drove up prices there. This is what happens when capitalism is unregulated and production is concentrated in a few large companies. Another reason is the US is engaged in economic warfare with China. Apple was seeking to switch to Chinese suppliers but the U.S. blocked them.

With all that being said it’s a shame that the prices on everything going up has become the new normal. I have held off on all tech purchases. Furthermore I’m no longer backing up the source footage after a few weeks go by completing a project I only keep the final export.

I used to provide free backup but the rise in storage prices have made it budget consideration when filming multi cam projects.
 
There's a lawsuit that fits Peter's thoughts. But who knows. From Polygon:

Bombshell lawsuit alleges that RAM manufacturers are colluding to drive up prices​

Three companies that account for 90% of RAM revenue are being sued for anti-competitive practices.
Click to expand...

Whole article:
www.polygon.com

Bombshell lawsuit alleges that RAM manufacturers are colluding to drive up prices

A lawsuit against three companies that were previously convicted of conspiracy could remake the modern tech landscape
www.polygon.com www.polygon.com

But as much as these price increases are a drag...and they really really are... I draw a little bit of comfort thinking that compared to 20-30 years ago, drive capacity per dollar/euro/etc is super low. And we don't need to buy VTRs, DAT machines, edit controllers, and a bunch of other stuff.

Ya, that's cold comfort. But I gotta suck it up and move on. Uhg.
 
I was researching a laptop purchase a year ago the subject of these companies causing a shortage was known and planned by these companies but there was nothing that anyone could do to stop it.

So in some ways your process should always be the same that you consider all costs in producing a video. You either have to eat the cost, pass it on to the client or scale back what you including for a job. Long term backup isn’t free someone is going to have to pay for it.
 
I'm curious, how many of you all are just passing this cost along to the client?

I will typically list the price for a drive in all of the estimates I put together, along with a note that if they want to provide their own drive for offloading footage/data then I can take that expense off of the overall estimate total.

Most of the time they approve the cost for me to purchase one and bring it to the shoot because it's one less thing for them to worry about.

Sometimes, not all the time, if the project is a good one then I'll also store stuff as a backup on my own servers so I can work with it to post to my own websites, etc. But I have it written out in my contracts that I don't maintain a backup for clients. Once I hand it over it's their responsibility.

If it's an end to end project where I'm working direct to client and not through an agency then I still budget for a drive on all my estimates, and let them know that I have to bill for storage to work on their project(s). I've never had pushback on that.
 
Its a complicated issue. Generally in my business my clients theater or event related it's hard enough to get them to pay for the video, let alone charge more for backup, most would balk. I actually had a dancer contact me today requesting video from their performances many years ago.

For the history of video the cost of storage and ram has gone down, then during the pandemic that reversed, I think these companies realized they could take advantage by creating shortages and driving up the price to ridiculous levels.

I'm not in a position to pass these price increases on so I'm doing whatever I need to do limit my exposure. I had plans to replace my M1 Mac Mini but that's off the table. The price for M4 mini has doubled and even then they are out of stock.

I was watching a video saying cpu producers are increasing their prices 10-15% next year and that could go higher. The supply of Helium that is used to produce chips has been greatly reduced for years to come from the Iran war so the future is increased prices for all tech.
 
Alex H. said:
It’s absolutely because of AI data centers. And it’s ridiculous. In less than 6 months, a 4TB Samsung T7 went from about $230 to over $1000. Those are the drives that I use for Pro Tools sessions and for backing up production sound.

I need to upgrade my video editing storage, and I’m looking closely at the Samsung Pro-Blade Station and Pro Blade SSD mags. I know a few video editors who swear by them. The blades are also swappable. Still not the cheapest option, but seems to be one of the more affordable solutions under current circumstances.
Click to expand...

Is the Samsung Pro-Blade Station all you're considering or are there other possible options? I have a project that is going to be about 12TB and I think it'll be 3x 4TB sandisk SSDs hanging from the M1 16" MBP. I'm trying more and more to have the storage conversations upfront but like Peter says, it sucks when that itself might impact the overall green light. On the other hand, clients who get it, there's more potential paid work, e.g. giving 1080p graded files to reduce file sizes.

It seems like cameras give us bad 1080p files on purpose these days. To this day, I can't think of a project I've delivered that needed 4k.
 
Here's my current storage setup. I thought it might be helpful to know how others are handling their data as well, so if anyone else has their setups to share, I'd love to hear what you're doing.

84 TB OWC Thunderbay 8 in a RAID 5 configuration. I'm running 8 x 12 TB Toshiba MG07ACA12TE drives in this. This serves as long term storage and backup for my "working drive".

16 TB OWC Thunderbay mini in a RAID 0 configuration. I'm running 4 x 4 TB Toshiba MQ04ABB400 drives in this. This is my primary "working" drive for active projects and mostly optimized for speed. Although the drives for this are only 5400 RPM.

The 16 TB gets backed up daily to the 84 TB Thunderbay 8 using Carbon Copy Cloner. It will just copy over any updates made since the day before basically. I'm ok with this setup since I always have a backup.

I will typically spec out Samsung T5 or T7 drives in various sizes for when I need to offload footage onsite for clients and either hand stuff over at the conclusion of the shoot, or, bring that data back and copy it over to my previously mentioned working drives. Then I just hang on to the SSD's for future projects.

Happy to hear any feedback or best practices from others. Thanks!
 
Luckily, I am doing fine with my available storage but I can see the trend being what Peter stated - fewer backups! This might be a good time to explore archive codec options and go with a lower sized format? Since the consumer lines at these manufacturers have been shuttered or redirected, I do not expect the prices to return to 'where they were' once they get desperate and have to sell to us again. They will probably stop at 2/3s down from the highs... It is a shame that the AI boom uses different hardware than we use because if it is goes bust, the GPU and CPUs will just go to the dust bin. SSDs and memory might be salvageable.

Anyway, it is a mess but I don't see it as collusion as much as plain greed.
 
rob norton said:
It seems like cameras give us bad 1080p files on purpose these days. To this day, I can't think of a project I've delivered that needed 4k.
Click to expand...
This isn't an issue on my camcorders but my mirrorless cameras suffer from this. I believe this is because with large sensors the manufacture optimize for 4k and for 1080 they're line skipping or pixel binning to reduce the resolution without cropping. I assume its more intensive process to down sample to 1080.

The biggest risk I find is that If I delete the source files quicker now a days, if a mistake is noticed or some need arises to access the original footage it won't be there. But to be honest this is more of a psychological fear that scenario is very rare.
 
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