External Drive / Scratch Disk Recommendations

[Thoren Lowe]

I work at a post house and we use LACIE’s or G-Tech’s however I would highly recommend the G-tech drives as sometimes the lacie’s controller fails. (also they look nice!)

However you will not be able to digitise uncompressed HD onto any external drive unless it is a RAID set with optical connections, as the bandwidth is not large enough. You can however digitise at DVCProHD or HDV

[Walter Biscardi]

[dan cooper] “Can anyone recommend a really good external drive to purchase to use as a scratch disk for digitising varying formats of video such as DigiBeta, HDV, uncompressed HD, etc through an AJA Kona 3?”

First off, have you done a search on this forum for hard drive, media drive, array, etc…. This question comes up every week.

For Uncompressed HD you will require an array that can sustain at least 200 – 250MB/s. This is generally a minimum of a 5 drive array running either SATA or FibreChannel. I run the MaxxDigital EVO HD 8TB Array which tops out at almost 500MB/s in RAID 5. We also run LaCie S2S SATA units which are good for up to DVCPro HD, but not uncompressed. They’ve been rock solid for over two years.

Ciprico makes amazing FibreChannel and SATA solutions. Sonnet and Dulce are also good.

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

STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
Read my Blog!

[Walter Biscardi]

[Thoren Lowe] “However you will not be able to digitise uncompressed HD onto any external drive unless it is a RAID set with optical connections, as the bandwidth is not large enough.”

That’s incorrect. SATA arrays can easily do Uncompressed HD to 2k and even 4k. We get up to 500MB/s on our SAS/SATA array from MaxxDigital and other SATA arrays can get up near the same speeds if not faster.

At one time FibreChannel was the only way to go (which can be connected via copper too) but SATA caught up about two years ago.

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

STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
Read my Blog!

[Thoren Lowe]

quite right I stand corrected, I was a little rushed. SATA is probably going to be your best bet if you’ve just got one suite (it’s a lot cheaper!)

[Dan Cooper]

Thanks for all the advice. I did a search on the topic but didn’t see anything that matched. I will look into it further.

I have a related question to ask but will do so as a new post as there are a few other factors to take into consideration.

Thanks,
Dan

dan