-
Hard Drive Recommendations
I am going overseas to shoot a documentary and plan on working in the following manner… I estimate I will shoot around 50 Gigs per day. 11 day shoot. Taking 2 TB of storage and or 1 TB while burning DVDs throughout the day. I can easily hire an assistant who does this all day. I will be dumping 2 4 Gig P2 Cards to the Hard Drives via Powerbook and/or burning DVDs on the powerbook.
What are your recommendations for hard drives for a situation like this? Should I go with a huge drive in RAID, like
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firew…/EliteAL/RAID/Does anyone know of a 2 TB Raid that is reasonably priced?
or break it up into smaller drives? I thought about getting two enclosures and swapping drives out but it may be more trouble than it is worth. I cant afford to loose anything so I need to make sure the redundant system is well thought out.
Please advise…
-
8 Replies
-
Go with a 2TB LaCie raid on 800 FW on raid level 5
Rainer Wirth
-
We just shot all day… 8 minutes per card (DVCPro50) on 2-4GB cards… Interviews mainly. It is a new way to play for sure, but I really think we’ll all get used to this methodology. I HIGHLY recommend having more than 2 cards. We had a few moments when the Powerbook would hang upon ejecting the P2 card after ingesting footage into FCP using the “Import P2” style of transfer. This caused a few tense moments of “Did it stick” ?” and we would then re-insert the card to be certain the clips were on the hard drive.
We used a LaCie 250 GB USB drive as our capture scratch. It is really quiet and it worked fine to capture/ingest to, and played back everything fine, though we did not edit with it on site. DVD burning was really slow and during the hectic moments of “the next guy is here, we need to shoot” it was too stressfull, so we don’t think we’ll be doing a lot of on-site DVD burning.
-
I have a new 17″ PB and I am use to burning 8x or 16x
on a PC. Is there a faster external DVD burner
that works well with a PB that anyone can recommend? -
Have you looked at the SeriTek 1EN2 sold by FirmTek? It is a nicely made small 2 bay SATA, hot swapable drive unite. You could set up the Seritek to mirror the drives so you are writing to two drives simultaneously for back up, then swap out 300 gig drives as they fill up. More drives would afford more protection than a single raid unite, and it would be easier to package individual drives for safe transport. The seritek set up in raid 0 also has plenty throughput for multiple channels of DVCPRO HD back in the editing suite.
Drew Harty
-
So mirroring instead of raiding right? I know that if you swap out drives that have a raid on them it screws things up, am I right? However you saying that if I mirror the drive I would have two nice copies of the same data, I could take both drives out and I would have the information secure on both drives? So therefore no need to worry about bruning DVDs (except maybe a copy of the most vital interviews just to be very safe. Also would I have any problems with these drive going through xrays during travel?
-
The problem I see with the Seritek drive is how to I get it to interface with my powerbook, because I need the PCIMA slot of the P2 cards. I guess I have to get a USB 2.0 or Firewire enclosure?
DAN
-
You didn’t state what type of computer you would be using in your original post, so the Seritek 2bay enclosure may not work because it requires two SATA connectors into your computer. I don’t know if there are dual SATA port cards available for laptops. You might check Firmtek’s site.
Drew Harty
-
Unfortunately, I don’t have any suggestions for your hard drive situation. I would however, be very interested in your results when you get back from your shoot. It sounds like a very interesting trial and I would be very interested in hearing how it worked out for you. I wish you the best of luck!
-Brian
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up