• Storage & Archiving

  Video storage, harddrives

  Posted by Neil Orman on July 11, 2014 at 11:34 am

  Hi,
  I’m a video producer and need a secure, scalable storage solution to replace a scattered series of external hard-drives. I also just need a better approach for backing up my media. Any advice on this would be hugely appreciated. This has long been a weak point. I’ve made videos for a long time but relied on several 1 TB to 4TB external hard-drives, which are all G-Drives from G-Tech. I’ve never had much of a system for backing up my media in case any of these hard-drives crashed except buying new ones. So my first question is can anyone recommend a better system for managing your media? Should I buy the more expensive external HD arrays, like the one below?
  https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/858463-REG/G_Technology_0G02272_8TB_G_RAID_External_Hard.html
  Or is there some other method? I have more than 5 TB of video content I’d like to preserve and also find a way I don’t have to worry about technical failures all the time. Any suggestions, or recommendations on resources, would be much appreciated.

  Thanks a lot,
  Neil

  Tim Jones replied 12 years, 1 month ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Tim Jones

  July 11, 2014 at 3:46 pm

  An external RAID is always going to be your best performance, but depending our your system, you may be able to get what you’re looking for with adding internal drives to your system.

  All of our Mac Pro 4,1 and 5,1 systems are fitted out with 3, 4TB Seagate Constellation ES.3 drives in Striped (RAID 0) mode. This gives us 12TB of acceptably fast (~400MB/sec) disk I/O. For our 2 Windows systems, we use Drive trays from Icy Dock that allow us to place 4 drives into 3, half-Height bays. We then create a Dynamic, striped (RAID 0) array of those drives to achieve similar performance on the Windows platforms. For the Windows systems, we use the ATTO H608 HBA with an SFF-8087 to 4 SATA plugs. We route the second 8087 to the outside with a SAS backplane adapter (SFF-8087 inside to SFF-8088 outside) for tape connectivity.

  The Mac systems are also connected to our ArGest RackMOD 320 (scroll to the bottom of the page) units for greater capacity and performance.

  For a bit more background, I’ve spent some time describing the elements behind disk storage in this blog post:

  Disk I/O Speeds, RAID levels and Spindle Count

  Of course, for proper backup and archival, I recommend some form of tape storage.

  Tim
  —
  Tim Jones
  CTO – TOLIS Group, Inc.
  https://www.productionbackup.com
  BRU … because it’s the RESTORE that matters!

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