-
Different storage options quandry.
Hi all,
I am about to upgrade my editing system and have been scratching my head over storage options. For the last few days i have read tons of forum posts, reviews and articles and my head is starting to hurt over what the best possible option could be and hope that an expert on here could guide me in the right direction.
I use mostly Adobe Premiere, photoshop and After Effects. Camera i use is a Canon C100 (soon to include Atomos Ninja 2)
I will be buying a new 2013 iMac, Quad i7, 3.5Ghz, 256gb SSD, GTX 780m graphics, 32gb ram.
The problem lies with storage. I am a one man band and am just looking for something fast and reliable. Between 4TB and 8TB will be fine as once a project is completed i move all the files onto its own dedicated external hard drive for arching. I have also been told Raid 5 is best for speed and problems with any drive failure.
For storage i have a few options and this is where i come unstuck.
Option 1 – Thunderbolt Drive
Something like a Pegasus Promise R4 4TB. Have read good and bad reviews and know i will loose some drive space in Raid 5.Option 2 – USB3 Drive
A salesperson i spoke to suggested a Lacie 8TB 4big. This will have enough storage and can have Raid 5. Will this be quick enough for working with the Canon C100 and Atomos Ninja 2 files.Option 3 – Drobo?
In my soon to be redundant PC there is 4 x Samsung HD103 drives and a Vortex 120gb SSD. These have been working great for last 2 and a half years and so could i buy something like a Drobo 5D and add these drives into it.Is Thunderbolt much quicker than USB 3 – will i even notice any differences?
Budget wise is about £800.
If anyone can help with this and suggest a decent option based o their own experiences I would appreciate it.Many thanks
Paul Trunkfield
-
3 Replies
-
from the three you have selected, the Promise is the best choice. Lacie does not make the most reliable storage products. Drobo is a backup solution, not a solution designed for editing. The Drobo is the worst choice.
Since you are using Premiere, and other Adobe products, you also need the following for proper performance –
1) a lot of RAM in your iMac
2) an NVidia Quadro with 1G of VRAM so the CUDA can be enabled – it might be too late, but the GTX675M is the right choice on the iMac (or greater). You will have slower performance with the GTX660M.
3) a dedicated Media Cache drive (Preferences> Media> Media Cache).
A cheap 250 gig SSD drive will work perfectly for this. I would not use your media drive for this, as you will get slower performance.You will see night and day performance difference between the Promise and the Drobo. What made you even think of considering the Drobo ?
Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
maxavid@cfl.rr.com -
Thanks Bob for the advice.
The iMac will have 32 gigs of ram and i like the idea of a separate 250GB SSD for the Media cache.
My only concern at the moment is the graphics card – GTX 780M 4GB – is not currently Adobe supported but i could be wrong.
I am sure it will be a system perfect for my needs.
-
just make sure the NVidia card in the iMac has 1G or more of RAM on it – this is shown on the https://www.apple.com website, under tech specs for the computers.
Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
maxavid@cfl.rr.com
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up