What kind of Video Storage are you Avid guys using these days... What Brand..Speed?
- Thread starter Omari7
- Start date
Shane Ross
Veteran
Same I use with FCP. Caldigit HD One...340MB/s. G-Drive Mini, CalDigit VR Mini, Glyph bus powered FW drive. INternal SATA drives.
bruceallen
Well-known member
I used to use an 8-drive SATA RAID-6 enclosure ($1200 for Highpoint hardware RAID-6 card and enclosure). But then I got an iMac, so no PCI RAID card for me. Thunderbolt should fix that.
In the meantime, I use four OWC Qx2s (they're $299 empty). These have 4x 3TB hitachi drives in them, set to RAID-5. So 9TB usable space per Qx2.
Two of them contain data, the other two are a mirror of the first two (synchronized via SuperFlexibleFileSynchronizer, set to "verify files" after copy, with 7 day deletion delay).
I have a rotating backup: every month, I take the 8 drives out of the backup Qx2s and swap them with 8 more drives that live in a Pelican case. I leave the Pelican case at my work.
So basically, I have:
18TB of current storage (two sets of RAID-5)
- with a "approx. few days old" backup on-site
- and a "approx. month old" backup off-site
...costing me a whopping total of $5600 ($1200 for the Qx2s plus $4200 for the 54TB storage needed total).
The delay actually helps me because if I delete something, I can go back.
Also, all of these drives were bought separately. I've been buying a 3tb or two every month since they came out. So the chance of two drives being in the same bad batch (and causing RAID-5 failure) is low.
If a project is done and it's small, I keep it on the storage. If it's gigantic (like a feature I color-corrected) I leave the most important stuff on the main storage and make a QX2 raid set of everything, plus back it up to separate G-Tech / LaCie drives, and put those in different locations in Pelican or Turtle cases.
I must admit I'm not sure why people still use tape if they can do something like this so cheaply. Every single VFX company I know who relied on tape didn't manage to get stuff back after a restore. I've seen 4 Xserve RAID crashes first-hand and the results were never pretty!
Expansion plan is to move to a 6 or 8 drive Thunderbolt RAID (or put my old RAID card in an external Thunderbolt enclosure) and then use all of the Qx2s for backup.
Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
In the meantime, I use four OWC Qx2s (they're $299 empty). These have 4x 3TB hitachi drives in them, set to RAID-5. So 9TB usable space per Qx2.
Two of them contain data, the other two are a mirror of the first two (synchronized via SuperFlexibleFileSynchronizer, set to "verify files" after copy, with 7 day deletion delay).
I have a rotating backup: every month, I take the 8 drives out of the backup Qx2s and swap them with 8 more drives that live in a Pelican case. I leave the Pelican case at my work.
So basically, I have:
18TB of current storage (two sets of RAID-5)
- with a "approx. few days old" backup on-site
- and a "approx. month old" backup off-site
...costing me a whopping total of $5600 ($1200 for the Qx2s plus $4200 for the 54TB storage needed total).
The delay actually helps me because if I delete something, I can go back.
Also, all of these drives were bought separately. I've been buying a 3tb or two every month since they came out. So the chance of two drives being in the same bad batch (and causing RAID-5 failure) is low.
If a project is done and it's small, I keep it on the storage. If it's gigantic (like a feature I color-corrected) I leave the most important stuff on the main storage and make a QX2 raid set of everything, plus back it up to separate G-Tech / LaCie drives, and put those in different locations in Pelican or Turtle cases.
I must admit I'm not sure why people still use tape if they can do something like this so cheaply. Every single VFX company I know who relied on tape didn't manage to get stuff back after a restore. I've seen 4 Xserve RAID crashes first-hand and the results were never pretty!
Expansion plan is to move to a 6 or 8 drive Thunderbolt RAID (or put my old RAID card in an external Thunderbolt enclosure) and then use all of the Qx2s for backup.
Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com
DadinWestchester
Well-known member
I have the Raidon 4 bay esata enclosure. Pretty easy to setup and use.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816142003
I won't go into the rooms of AVID Unity arrays at work.....
Omari,
I see you are at NYU. (Which my son will be applying to)
Email me if you want a tour of the largest AVID editing facility in the world located in midtown.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816142003
I won't go into the rooms of AVID Unity arrays at work.....
Omari,
I see you are at NYU. (Which my son will be applying to)
Email me if you want a tour of the largest AVID editing facility in the world located in midtown.
Last edited:
Jason Adams
Section Moderator
I have been using one of these. They are awesome and only 500 bucks.
http://www.datoptic.com/hardware-raid-5-enclosure-esata-five-drives.html
http://www.datoptic.com/hardware-raid-5-enclosure-esata-five-drives.html
Tape is yesterday's technology and, having worked in IT for many years, I can definitely agree that even though your backup was marked as successful, it doesn't mean that the restore will be successful and I too have seen many people get burned by this.
Another good point you bring up is keeping copies of your data at multiple locations in case there's a fire, natural disaster, or break-in.