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Hardware for longterm archive
I’m trying to figure out the best way to do a long term archive of our P2 media.
We have multiple clients and agencies, and we have to dig up footage from the past quite often, so i want to create a reliable archiving workflow. (We still capture stuff off of D2.. and i’m so young I never knew D2 existed).
Our workflow right now is to import through a Powerbook to a 250GB G-Drive, and transfer that data to our (soon to come) XRaid.
We need a solid solution for archiving the MXF files long term. Blue Ray sounds pretty sketchy, we’re not very hot on trusting such data to sit on optical discs.
My initial idea is having some firewire drives to back up to and store on the shelf, and that bring me to two questions:#1- What type of drive? Should I get a GRaid2? Would just a GDrive suffice? Could I save money and go with Lacie? Any advantages to getting a single 1TB drive as opposed to 4 250GB drives?
#2- How do these types of drives hold up in the long term? They wouldn’t be used very often, they would just sit until/if we need to recall that footage.. am I naive in thinking that since the drive wouldn’t be used much that it should last for 10 years?
As always, thanks in advance!
Ross A. Hendrickson
Editor, Video Arts Studios
https://www.videoartsstudios.com -
2 Replies
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OK, this is a scetchy question, but here is an answer.
Buy something like the STARDOM SOHOTANK
https://www.stardom.com.tw/web/pro-sohotank.htmThese cabinets will give you a quick, easy and cheap way to connect standard SATA drives to FW 800/400.
Buy off-the-shelf SATA drives, when you need them, and fill’em up.
Archive the drives safely and well marked
Cheers!
Gunleik
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Hey Ross. I was going through this same question about two weeks ago and I needed to buy and now. All of our possible drive space everywhere was beginning to fill up and I needed something quick. I just got a SATA dock v4 from wiebetech. It’s this completely ugly fw800 to SATA connector. It’s looks like Medusa’s child with a power switch. You plug a bare SATA drive into it, run a fw800 cable (or USB 2.0) to your computer, plug in the power supply and away you go. I got OEM drives by hitachi from NewEgg.com. Much to my surprise, the drives came in stackable plastic containers. The drive dock was almost as expensive than 4 250GB drives from NewEgg. Today I had one project that had over 200 gigs of stuff (including some P2 media). I backed that up to the drive today, arranged a finder window of it’s contents, took a screen shot, printed that out and put that in the clear plastic case so you could read what’s on the drive just by looking through the case. i then put that drive on the shelf. I have been avoiding SATA for a long time (it bit me hard early on, but I wasn’t using it for long term storage then). I did not want to stick hard drives on the shelf. It just doesn’t seem like the best way to me, but I did it and I think I’m happy, we’ll see what happens when I spin that drive up again after it’s been sitting around for a year. I was looking into an SDLT system from Quantum, but couldn’t find enough info on it and the reports I got on it (from the COW) were that it was doggedly slow. It’s really pricey too. Seems like it would be a good solution, but I couldn’t get anyone to talk to me about it or that knew enough to really pull the trigger on it.
Hope this helps.
Jeremy
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