best approch to increase disk space on PC?

[John Rofrano]

Actually, you should never delete your video files unless you have them backed up somewhere. I would recommend you get an external hard drive to copy them and the entire project onto and then delete them from your hard drive.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Gilles Gagnon]

Hey John,
I’m curious,… do you keep 2 copies of your backups or do you trust a single hard drive?
G

Gilles

[John Rofrano]

[Gilles Gagnon] “I’m curious,… do you keep 2 copies of your backups or do you trust a single hard drive?”

I keep 2 copies. I would never trust a single hard drive.

I plan to get an enclosure that can support RAID 5 like the G-Tech G-SPEED Q so that I only have to copy it to one place and know that it’s safe from a single drive failure but until then, I have two 2TB hard drives that I copy all projects and raw footage onto (twice one for each drive).

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Gilles Gagnon]

Thanks John. i also keep 2x 2TB drives at the moment as well. Given that’s what you do… I’ll keep doing it as well 🙂

I will look into the RAID solution you mentioned. It would cut the time to copy.

Cheers,
G

Gilles

[Dave Haynie]

[John Rofrano] “I keep 2 copies. I would never trust a single hard drive.
“

That’s smart.

For large projects, I have a project drive. I have SATA carrier slots for one 3.5″ drive and two 2.5″ drives. I use these as working project drives during an edit. When I’m done with the project, I make sure all assets, .veg files, etc. are on the project drive. I copy the finished media to my RAID, and the complete project as well (that will not live forever on the RAID, but I have enough space, or too little work, so I have these around for a year or two). I also archive the critical stuff to BD-R.

[John Rofrano] “I plan to get an enclosure that can support RAID 5 like the G-Tech G-SPEED Q so that I only have to copy it to one place and know that it’s safe from a single drive failure but until then, I have two 2TB hard drives that I copy all projects and raw footage onto (twice one for each drive).
“

It’s important to know the difference between RAID and archival. The RAID ensures you have your stuff very readily available. But never assume that it’s immune to loss on the RAID – you still need backups, archival copies, whatever you choose. Your RAID could perish in a storm, get fried by an electrical glitch (lightening strike, bad power supply failure), etc.

And it can get damaged in software. Naturally, they run some filesystem… usually NTFS on Windows systems. That can get soft-corrupted. You can lose data, not though a hardware fault necessarily, but it can get corrupted. I had a problem on my RAID awhile back where Windows couldn’t fix a problem with CHKDSK, and I did occasionally see errors. I actually had to buy a spare 2TB drive to have enough spares to backup and reformat easily — and of course, I lost the protection against single drive failure that day.

Another thing… I use a Drobo. That’s kind of a smarter version of RAID. It can use different drives from different vendors, while many RAIDs really want exactly the same version of the same drive. The way Drobo does it is good for several reasons. For one, while the base unit is pricey, you can start with just two drives. At that point, it behaves much like a RAID1 (Mirror). As you add drives, it behaves more like a RAID5 (or RAID6 in the newer models). In all cases, you get immunity from single drive failure (dual drive failure in the RAID-6-like mode, not supported on my unit).

There are two things the Drobo, after quite some time, buys me over the typical RAID. For one, when I set it up, I could use a mix of drives I had on hand… originally two 1TB and two 512GB drives. But if I was buying new drives, you have a bit of concern over MTBF issues. In short, if I have four identical drives from the same lot, there’s an awfully good chance they’re going to fail at about the same time. A typical RAID may take a few days to rebuild once a drive fails. You really don’t want that second drive failing at the same time. So buying a mix of drives — even different lots of the same drive — dramatically lowers that chance.

Eventually, I upgraded to four 2TB drives, but that was over the course of some years. Since the drives don’t have to be matched in any way, if one dies, I can replace it with a larger drive today… a recent software update now allows drives up to 4TB, a total of 16TB raw storage.

-Dave

[John Rofrano]

[Dave Haynie] “Another thing… I use a Drobo.”

Dave how is the write throughput on the Drobo?

I get about 60-70MB/s sustained write speed on my eSata drives in an enclosure with stand-alone drives (JBOD). Earlier I had configured that enclosure for RAID 5 but my write speed dropped to 12MB/s! It literally took several hours to back up a single project which was unacceptable. Then I don’t always keep the enclsure on because the fans are too loud and a few days later I turn it on and then turn the computer on and it started rebuilding the RAID which took 24hrs. I deleted the RAID 5 and went back to using stand-alone disks.

I assumed that my poor RAID performance was due to it being implemented in software and that a hardware RAID would perform better which is why I’m looking at the G-TECH. Is my assumption correct?

Would I be better off just getting a Drobo?

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com