Drobo vs G-drive

[Chris Poisson]

Patricia,

You’re comparing apples to oranges. Drobo is a backup system. And it looks like it works as advertised. A G-Drive also can be used for storage, but what a waste.

There also are quite a few Hard Drive docks, which are really cheap and easy to use, you just plug and empty drive into them. fill it up and move to the next.

Have a wonderful day.

[Patricia Stitson]

Fair enough.

Was curious if it’s capabilities extended beyond storage and hadn’t found anything to support that.

G-SpeedeS recommended?

Patty

[Rennie Klymyk]

If I were purchasing this level of storage today I’d go for a sata connection and a unit that has bays that accept bare hard drives (like the Dobro does). Unfortunately the Dobro is firewire interface and it automatically adds any new drive you put in, into the raid system. Other systems like my old Firmtek allow you to configure the drives as you see fit. I have specific drives for specific clients and I swap them when I’m doing work for those clients. So of the 4 drives it holds I can set up 2 or 3 drives to be raided and one for what ever. I do many different tasks with my computer so I like being able to keep certain things on specific drives. Since I already have my edit media needs adequately looked after I would consider a Dobro as they would be handy for timemachine and other desk top stuff but for external media storage a system that takes bare HDDs without a sled or adapter and interfaces via sata is available for the same cost. My older Firmtek requires sleds or adapters to enable you to slide the drives into the unit. I have 8 sleds but wish I had 16. The new ones that don’t require these sleds/adapters are a nice improvement.

“thou can not stir a flower without crumbling a star” ……Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

[Alex Elkins]

[Chris Poisson] “There also are quite a few Hard Drive docks, which are really cheap and easy to use, you just plug and empty drive into them. fill it up and move to the next.”

Such as this? https://www.allcam.biz/catalog/product_info.php?ref=7&products_id=693
It says it only works with Windows though. I suspect that may not be the case, as I’ve used a number of external drives that don’t specifically mention compatibility with Macs but do actually work fine. If I were to buy a hard drive dock, should I only go for something that specifies Mac compatibility?

While on the subject, could someone give me an idea as to what commonly used video codecs, other than DV, an e-SATA drive could handle? Is ProRes out of the question?

Thanks.

[Chris Poisson]

Exactly like that, there are many that are Mac compatible. Most are USB, but what the hay, they’re just for storage.

Check out newegg.com.

Have a wonderful day.

[Patricia Stitson]

One more question.

what does this mean

“Supports multi-stream SD, Apple ProRes 422 and HD video workflows”

specifically what does “multi-stream” mean practically?

Thanks

Patty

[Walter Biscardi]

[Patricia Stitson] “specifically what does “multi-stream” mean practically? “

Means more than one track of video at the same time. So you can do dissolves and wipes in realtime for example as you have to play both the outgoing and incoming clip of video at the same time.

Or picture in picture like a box of video over another full screen video.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.

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[Rennie Klymyk]

Multistream is how FCP edits multi camera shoots (splits the canvas into up to 16 windows and displays up to 16 tracks at a time in motion so you can edit on the fly. So they are saying the drive can handle SD multi stream (but they don’t say how many)

“thou can not stir a flower without crumbling a star” ……Henry Wadsworth Longfellow