• Cinematography

  A DIT question: to RAID or not to RAID

  Posted by Angelo Lorenzo on May 4, 2012 at 10:33 pm

  *This didn’t get any love in the field production forum, but since the DIT is part of the camera department and we all have to work through data storage, I figured it was worth the double post*

  When I perform DIT work, I usually purchase pairs of external drives. I use Shotput Pro to offload data from camera and sound media which allows me to offload to multiple disks simultaneously. Time-wise, offloading to two separate drives is a non-issue.

  I had the chance to work with a director’s GSafe which is Hitachi’s little two drive RAID 1 box and I liked using it. I kind of want to purchase one, or something similar, on my own.

  Pros:
  -Smaller footprint
  -Less cabling
  -Keeps an eSATA port open for the RED Station (my tower only has two eSATA ports) so it eliminates a speed bottleneck there
  -Cheaper for productions as bare drives are less expensive than full external drives

  Cons:
  -I don’t need to purchase this as all productions supply a hard drive budget, so I can just get externals
  -Bare drives are more fragile to transport and store outside of the RAID trays once they are handed to the client
  -Post production would need a hard drive docking station (hard drive toaster) to deal with bare drives
  -Full mirroring is a blessing and a curse; Data loss from accidental human deletes could be a factor albeit a very small one. I’m the only one who touches data on-set, and while in a RAID, and I’m not that foolish

  Thoughts? Looks like logically the answer is leaning more towards no, so maybe I’m suffering from some gear lust.

  Angelo Lorenzo replied 12 years, 10 months ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
• 0 Replies

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up