I need more hard drive space and I’m on a budget

[David Roth weiss]

[Cornelius Henke] “I was thinking about buying Four of these:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148373
and linking them through RAID 5 for protection.”

The drives are fine Cornelius, but there are two big holes in your plan.

1) You would need to relocate your system drive to the spare optical drive bay in order to accommodate four additional drives. ( there are solution for that, but you have be prepared for it.) The easy solution is to get three drives to fill the three bays that your 500gb drives occupy now, and stripe them in a raid configuration.

2) Raid 5 requires a raid card and cannot be accomplished via Apple Disk Utility. So, Raid 0 with manual backups to inexpensive firewire drives is your most economical solution.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

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[Walter Biscardi]

[Cornelius Henke] “Now, here’s the question: Is there a better way? I use final cut pro and after effects on a daily basis. I need a better hard drive configuration, but I want to conserve money at this point in time. Would I be better off buying an external raid setup? or just buying external hard drives for all my old storage?

I like to keep all of the files after I complete a project, but I don’t need them on my computer and shutting down the computer, swapping the hard drives, and rebooting is not a problem just to grab some old files. I just want to conserve money, but optimize my computers storage. “

The guys at Maxx Digital have some nice reasonably priced RAID 5 external arrays, both their own and other manufacturers. What I would do is purchase one of those, the size is up to your budget but I would try to go no smaller than 2TB. If you tell them what your needs and budget are, they can set you up the proper configuration.

I would also pick up a SATA enclosure that allows you to swap out hard drives to archive projects you want to store. Except for a few clients, we do not archive anything unless the client purchases a hard drive for us to store stuff on. Otherwise, all I store are project files, graphics and animations. All video media is cleared off. For those couple of clients, I picked up a 2 bay Maxx Digital SATA enclosure and just put 1TB drives in there to archive the long form stuff. I have a separate drive for each long form project we currently have going on. When I need to archive material for them, I just slap the drive in, archive, then pull the drive out and put it back on the shelf.

I would also clean up your internal drives and use those as temporary storage for projects you want to keep at the ready. If you know a client is going to call you again in a month to make changes, you can clean off your external array and just move the media to those internal drives. No sense getting rid of them, you can continue to use those.

I know everyone is on a budget these days, but hard drives are one of THE most important purchases we make for our facilities. You need to spend wisely to ensure you don’t have any issues during income earning gigs.

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

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[Zane Barker]

Those drives should be fine.

One thing with your plan of getting 4 drives though is that your computer only has 4 drive slots and you need to keep in mind that one of those drives is needs to be left out of your raid to be used for the system drive (always keep the system drive separate from media drives.

You could ether keep the same drive or you could replace it with one of your 500GB drives, or even replace it with another 1TB drive.

If you are on a really tight budget and cannot afford the type of drives that Walter mentioned then I would buy 3 of those new egg hard drives. Take the three 500 GB drives out, put in the new drives and raid them with disk utility. Then get a drive dock like this https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817816009 that lets you connect a old drive via USB or eSATA and transfer that info to the new raid.

Once you have freed up one of the 500GB drives you could even use carbon copy cloner to clone your system drive to the larger drive and then replace the system drive with the clone inside the machine and your machine is ready to go.

The drive dock also lets you attach ether your extra drives or new larger drives to the computer to back up projects. Then just label the drives and store them in anti static bags for safer storage.

There are no “technical solutions” to your “artistic problems”.
Don’t let technology get in the way of your creativity!

[Cornelius Henke]

These are all excellent answers. Thanks.

As for the older footage and files, I like to keep all of it on disc because I tend to find “immediate solutions” to editing problems that in the random amounts of excess footage that I have captured in the past. It is sort of my own private stock footage collection. I have all the back ups on Tape, but searching through hundreds of DV tapes, to me.. Is not an option. It is much easier to remember a keyword and type it into Finder’s search box. That’s why I was interested in an external RAID device. (Of course if I had the money I would have a server, shared on a network.)

[John Fishback]

Here’s another option for connecting naked SATA drives to your edit computer https://www.newertech.com/products/voyagerq.php

I just bought a Voyager Q with a Hitachi 1 TB SATA drive for $180. Additional Hitachi 1TB drives are $90. It’s a great (and fast) way to archive projects.

John

MacPro 8-core 2.8GHz 8 GB RAM OS 10.5.5 QT7.5.5 Kona 3 Dual Cinema 23 ATI Radeon HD 3870
ATTO ExpressSAS R380 RAID Adapter, PDE Enclosure with 8-drive 6TB RAID 5
24″ TV-Logic Monitor
Final Cut Studio 2 (up to date)

Pro Tools HD w SYNC IO, Yamaha DM1000, Millennia Media HV-3C, Neumann U87, Schoeps Mk41 mics, Genelec Monitors, PrimaLT ISDN

[Cornelius Henke]

John,
I like the NewerTech Voyager Q, but I know that these external SATA docking devices are new (who would have thought that not having a case would make these things more expensive then having one). I want one with Firewire 800 (1394b), but $99.97 does justify that at this point and you could have bought a 1TB Seagate hard drive for $69.99 and still bought the dock (you would only save $10, but if we all begin cutting these “ear-marks,” then maybe our Government could as well.

For those who want to know, this thread really helped me in the decision process.
I Bought 3 1TB Seagate SATA drives from Newegg.com (the best), cleared off my best functioning hard drive. Cloned my original 250GB hard drive using SuperDuper! (worked flawlessly). Shut down the computer and swapped old drives for new ones, then restarted and Striped RAID 0 all the drives together. 2.7TB total for under $300 can’t be beat.

I plan on buying an external dock when the price is right. There are about 14 different types on Newegg ranging from $29.99 to $130, but most of them are USB 2.0 and ESATA (which I don’t have and seem to always have problems with). Hopefully they will drop in the near future.