Drives???

[Darrin]

I’m using a LaCie 250GB external……works fine….just keep your apps on separate drive from your working files

[Walter Biscardi]

G-RAID and LaCie Big Disk Extremes for most SD

Medea FCR2X Fibre Channel for both SD and HD.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com

“The Rough Cut,” an original short film premiering December 7th in full High Definition in Atlanta.
rsvp@biscardicreative.com to reserve seats.
https://www.theroughcutmovie.com

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Dan Archer]

What capture card are you suing with these “Medea” drives?

[Michael Peele]

SD Uncompressed or DV format?
HD Uncompressed or HDV or DVCPRO HD format?

If DV, a single firewire (preferably FW800) should be just fine.

For SD Uncompressed, you need to sustain about 30MB/sec, more if you want realtime transitions. Plan on a single channel SCSI drive – check out Medea’s solutions or other similar solutions. Another option is a RAID array of 2-4 SATA drives. Search this forum for more info on these types of arrays. Both single channel SCSI and SATA RAIDs are also suitable for HDV and DVCPRO HD storage.

For HD Uncompressed, you need to sustain 165MB/sec for 1080i for this you will need a dual channel SCSI RAID array or a Fibre Channel array with 8 drives or more. For HD formats that require less of a data rate. You should be able to get aways with a 4-way SATA RAID.

Of course, you can always get away with less, but you will suffer from less performance, i.e. less frames visible when scrubbing timeline. You will also be placing more of a workload on your drives, increasing the chance of data corruption or drive failure. On the subject of drive failure, a RAID array that is created with RAID 5 or 3 can withstand the loss of a drive and still maintain data integrity. This is a good thing. A RAID 0 will lose all your data if one drive in the array. That is a bad thing.

Hope that helps,
Mike Peele

[Dan Archer]

Good info … Thanks!