Just curious about p2 and Raid drive.

[Shane Ross]

[carlos castro] “My question is why is it necessary to use a raid drive in the field if you are shooting on P2?”

Because P2 cards are expensive…you don’t have TONS of cards to shoot to, you have maybe two to 5 cards. And they fill up fast. So what you do is reuse them. When one fills up, you offload the card to multiple drives, or a RAID 1 Drive unit like the CalDigit VR. Then you can erase the card and put it back in your. Your footage now on the Raid unit. These are, in essence, your source tapes.

You don’t need a raid, it is just a solid and simple thing to use. I myself use multiple bus powered firewire drives. I back the cards up to two drives, then we send one back to the post house and keep one on set. When we are sure the post house has transferred the files to the main backups, and things are fine, then we reuse the external drives again.

I use CalDigit drives as media drives. I use G-drive minis and LaCie Rugged drives in the field. And Acomdata drives.

Shane

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[Noah Kadner]

RAIDs are faster and much more reliable than a single hard drive. And difficulty-wise once you configure the RAID it is exactly the same as working with a hard drive.

Noah

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[Matthew Romanis]

We have a Caldigit 1.5TB and a Taurus 3TB both set to Raid 1.
The reason for doing this is so there is total redundancy of the stored P2 media.
Our Caldigit, for example, has two 750GB drives and in a normal Raid 0, this would mean that you could store up to 1.35TB of usable data storage (allowing for 10% headroom), but it is not redundant.
A Raid 1 is a mirror, meaning that one 750GB drive is mounted while the other is a complete separate drive that has exactly what the mounted drive contains. So when you transfer a P2 card to the mounted drive, another copy is made to the mirror drive at the same time.
This is different than a partition in that if a part of the drive or all of the drive becomes corrupted or damaged, you simply mount the mirror drive (either through manually changing drive pins inside the enclosure, or through software in some cases) and you have a backed up copy of all your media. With a partition, you run the risk of loosing all the data if there is a hardware problem.
You could easily do the same by making two separate copies of the P2 media on two separate drives, but the Raid 1 way is idiot proof.
The Taurus drive we have has an eSata connection which makes editing in the field a breeze, the data rate is phenomenal allowing for multi layering of HD streams in real time.
The only drawback is that both these drives require mains power, which means that some applications in the field become limited.
It is very careless/dangerous to have only one copy of your media on drive, more so when you are travelling anywhere. I have experienced around 5 separate drive failures over the years, the 1st was fatal for all the data, the others thankfully were in Raid 1 (mirror) and raid 5 (self re build, Raid 5 can’t be used on a two disk array), so I have not suffered data loss in those instances. Never trust one drive 100%.

[Carlos Castro]

Thanks Shane.

I figured it was due to the cards being recycled, I was just wondering why a raid instead of a regular drive. It makes sense though if you have to reuse them, especially in Production type work. I’m glad to hear you’ve had good experiences with cal digit, I plan to get one here in the next week or so.

I notice that their are several types of connectors for the raid, firewire, eSata, etc… any particular preference?

I looking for speed redundancy and reliability. I’m sure we all are, lol.

[Matthew Romanis]

If you are using the duel adapter with a laptop then eSata won’t work as it has to use the express slot too.
Stick with a drive enclosure that has 1394a(FW400) and 1394b(FW800).
eSata as well as the firewire connections mentioned is good for all round use.

[Carlos Castro]

Thanks Noah.

That makes sense. It must be much more prevelent in production type work, I still haven’t seen raids in News Broadcasting. In the field that is, we have them in house {Server}. I guess time and money are an issue, not that they aren’t in production.

We typically use 2 16g cards a day to shoot enough material to put together a 1:30-1:45 piece. During major news coverage we will go into 4-5 and offload them to external drives.

[Carlos Castro]

Great Point!

“It is very careless/dangerous to have only one copy of your media on drive, more so when you are traveling anywhere. I have experienced around 5 separate drive failures over the years, the 1st was fatal for all the data, the others thankfully were in Raid 1 (mirror) and raid 5 (self re build, Raid 5 can’t be used on a two disk array), so I have not suffered data loss in those instances. Never trust one drive 100%. ”

I have had a P2 camera for about 2 years at work, to date I’ve been lucky, no issues. Drives on the other hand a different story. It makes perfect sense then when a client pays the rates they tend to pay production houses, to not have the material at the end of the day, that could get ugly.

[Carlos Castro]

Hey Shane one last thing, in your post it says you travel with G minis, to off load P2’s, how many and what size?

Do you have a preference as to the connection type{fire wire, usb, sata etc..} for raids, desktop or portables?

Thanks for your input.

[Jeremy Garchow]

Everything I put on a hard disk on my production machines is organized for the archive, and that begins at the shoot. We have a two drive sata enclosure that we run JBOD (not raid). I then use shotput Pro to make two copies of the material right there at the shoot. This way we can send one drive with one person and another drive with another person if we are traveling. Or one drive below deck and one drive in a backpack. Sometimes, we ship a drive back and carry one on. It all depends. The point being is that we have an removable drive enclosure. Once those drives get 60-80% full we pull them and then they become the archive on the shelf, double backed up right away. I will be looking for a more permanent archiving and database system at NAB this year, but for now, this has been serving us well. We have about 20TBs and counting worth of SATA drives. We are going to need a system in place to manage all this soon. I should preface that we also have a PCD20 to so our card transfers with, freeing up the faster Express34 slot for editing.

Jeremy

[Carlos Castro]

Thanks Jeremy, lots of useful info their for me. I guess that’s a nice problem to have, 2oTB not enough space, you must be cranking out the work.

Thanks