Drobo for archiving?

[Alaa Ghuniem]

I use Smartstore from Promise with 4 HDD ( 1.0 TB ) actually 3.8 TB with RAID 5 It is cheaper and better than LTO but the price is 500$ plus the HDD ( 4 X $160) = $640 so totally the price is $1140 and the speed better than LTO as I think
But I ‘m looking for software can empty my P2 card to the PC and the storage ate the same time and the speed of this process I will check it today
and I will see

[Rob Womack]

One of the problems with using hard drives for long term storage is that if they sit idle, the components can sometimes fail, or so I have read. I recently bought a Drobo, and it seems that this might be a viable solution for long term storage. Granted, mine is up most of the time, but how likely is it that more than one of your drives is going to go south at once, without some kind of extraordinary event causing it, i.e. a flood or EMP?

Robert Womack
Creative Bridgekeep
http://www.CurrentMarketing.com
“Louisville’s Leading Interactive Marketing Agency”

[Rich Rubasch]

It seems that the discussion on what to do with the P2 original footage is still in full swing, with no solution rising to the top as the defacto standard. What’s long term, what’s fast, what will be future proof? Well, I was outputting station dubs to Betacam, an old analog format, back in the mid 1990s. i can still play those tapes today. We still output to Betacam today for station dubs in our market.

So what’s wrong with outputting the raw footage to a DVCProHD tape? It will sit on the shelf nicely until you need it. It will last a long, long time, and making a dub is easy enough and pretty cost effective. Having a deck will allow you to archive your projects to tape as well so you can make dubs from the tape, rather than having to restore a file and then convert it to whatever format.

The post workflow is ok, but I think this is one new format that even the manufacturers didn’t put much thought into what would happen after the shot was captured to the media card. The options become dramatically exponential the farther from the card you get.

Clunksville.

Rich Rubasch
Tilt Media

[Christopher Wright]

So what’s wrong with outputting the raw footage to a DVCProHD tape?
The cost of the deck??

Dual 2.5 G5, IO, Kona LH, IO, Medea Raid, UL4D, NVidia 6800, 4Gig RAM
Octocore 8 GB Ram, Radeon card, MBP, MXO
Windows XP Adobe Studio CS3, Vegas 8.0, Lightwave 9.2, Sound Forge 9, Acid Pro 6, Continuum 5, Boris Red 4, Combustion 2008, Sapphire Effects

[Jeremy Garchow]

The fact that there’s no Avc-intra deck?

We have no less than 10TBs of single drive SATA storage sitting on the shelf waiting to be offloaded to something more secure. Right now, we just don’t know what that is. I imagine once SSD drives become as big and cheap as current spinning disk drives, that will be the way to go.

LTO seems to be the only other option at this point, but it seems kind of clunky, old and slow.

Jeremy

[Alaa Ghuniem]

What about the Blue-ray ?

[Shaune Fradley]

I also share the issues highlighted here. All of our projects end up on tape somehow, but many of the products we make here end up coming around again for re-editing for different clients. So we are left with a big dilemma of keeping the projects live for a very long time (not good at all for day-to-day edit storage), or chucking it all out onto tape and then recapturing as necessary (not good for fast turn around).

A hot swap sata-based solution would be great as each project could have a dedicated drive that takes up no more shelf space than a tape. If the drive fails we can always go back to our tapes.

Can Drobo work with just one disk at a time? Or are there any other caddy-based systems out there that could be just what everyone needs?

[Alexander Hemingway]

Doesn’t that seem ideal? To me, the only knock against Drobo would be the idle drives freezing up over time… which I think could be solved by just plugging them in periodically… And if you’re swapping drives (project media) for different clients over time then it seems like that might happen naturally in your workflow. I’m not 100% sold yet, but I’m leaning more Drobo than anything else.

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Alaa Ghuniem] “What about the Blue-ray ?”

I’m not really sold on BluRay just yet. Plus, it would take a lifetime to transfer our archive to BluRay.

[Alexander Hemingway] “Doesn’t that seem ideal?”

I don’t know. I don’t understand how it works. I am not sure if you can just hot swap drives, it seems to want to build some sort of redundancy with every drive you shove in there which means it might get pissed if you take one out. Just today, I initialized SATA disk number 24 for our archives today.

Insane. We have to figure something else out.

Jeremy

[Jeremy Garchow]

You know I did some reading, and once the drive has been in the Drobo, you can’t use it anywhere else and it erases all of your information from existing drives (its good if you are starting from scratch). Once the Drobo is no more, your data is unreadable.

I don’t know, it doesn’t seem like a good long term storage solution but could be a good interim solution I guess.

Jeremy