best storage drive for unloading finished project files

[Bob Zelin]

no. They all stink. You can buy any eSATA drive from Toshiba, HGST, Western Digital or Seagate for this – whoever has the best price. When you look at the various brands, like G-Tech, Lacie, OWC, etc. all they are is a metal box that holds one of these drives. You can get a USB/USB3/eSATA toaster and put in a raw drive and do the same thing for backup, and save money. But all drives stink (the HGST Ultrastar drives, and the Western Digital RE series are they best, if there is such a thing), but you can’t rely on drives to be reliable. If it’s an important copy, make 2 copies. LTO is the only safe archive format, and LTO is a pain in the ass, and slow to work with.

So I only have miserable answers for you.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
maxavid@cfl.rr.com

[Rob Lambert]

Thanks for your post Bob. I hear you, there doesn’t seem to be a perfect way to do it. My project files are becoming about 1.5 to 2.5 TB….need to unload it somewhere. Maybe a 5TB WD will do the trick…until the next unload. Ha

[Alex Gerulaitis]

What about a Drobo 5N or 5D – or some cheap NAS? G-RAID 8TB? CineRAID H458 ($200) filled with 4TB drives in JBOD or RAID5?

[Eric Hansen]

I would get a bunch of cheap bare hard drives and a toaster. then save your projects on those drives following the 3-2-1 Rule:

3 copies
2 different types of media
1 offsite

as Bob said, hard drives are junk and fail. You can only protect yourself by having multiple copies. I recommend LTO, but the cost of entry is high (but if you’re archiving more than 20TB a year, it’s the cheapest by far). also, don’t buy enterprise hard drives (like Ultrastars) for this use. waste of money IMHO for drives that will sit on a shelf.

Alex has some good suggestions, but the same rule applies – have multiple copies and keep at least one copy off-site. I don’t go the NAS (Drobo) route because I don’t need to keep completed projects at near line

i use NeoFinder to catalog and search my archive hard drives and LTO tapes.

e

Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv

[Morten]

We recently purchased an LTO bundle from BRU, and I must say their Producers Edition software makes it easy to administer backups. One LTO5 tape will hold 1.5 TB raw data.

– No Parking Production –

2 x Finalcut Studio3, 2 x Prod. bundle CS6, 2 x MacPro, 2 x ioHD, Ethernet File Server w. X-Raid…. and FCPX on trial

[Bob Zelin]

Eric Hanson –
you are the FIRST person on Creative Cow to mention NeoFinder –
someone at Disney just showed this to me for the first time.
Seems like a GREAT program – cheap asset management, that is easy, and only 40 bucks !

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
maxavid@cfl.rr.com

[Eric Hansen]

And it’s designed for networked systems with a centralized database. It’s pretty slick and was an easy purchase decision for Brain Farm’s existing 400TB LTO library. It can be crashy though, so you have to be patient at times.

e

Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv