Just curious about p2 and Raid drive.

[Jeremy Garchow]

That’s 20TB sitting on the shelf for archive, not my desktop production raid, that’s only 8TB.

It’s about the last 5 or 6 years or work, and p2 shoots.

Jeremy

[Matthew Romanis]

Hi Jeremy,
What do you think of the story getting around that un-powered drives start to “evaporate” over time?
Is there any corroborated evidence?
One of the universities here in Australia is conducting a study at the moment, part of the study is an empirical test for which there won’t be results for a while, the other part is survey of users and their experiences.
I pulled a drive out of a 7 year old PPC that has spent the last 3 years as a door stop, and fired it up in an external enclosure. It took a long time to spool up and eventually was interrogated and mounted. Most of the Data that was left on it seemed OK, but several Docs were definitely corrupted and could not be repaired. Not a very scientific example, but enough so I don’t take it for granted.
One of the IT guys in the study has dozens of drives that he powers up once a month, he admits he has no evidence yet if this works, but he’s not taking chances and is also backing stuff up on LTO.
I have 36 LTO tapes (14TB) worth of Data backed up on our LTO, and periodically I go through some of the earlier LTO’s and randomly retrieve video and files.
We also have a tape library of over 4000 tapes, both wild reels and program masters. We have had several jobs in the last several years where we have needed to go back to wild reels shot almost 20 years ago, and library archive rolls from the 1940’s. So I’m becoming a little concerned at the longevity of our storage media. The film from the 40’s was in good condition and had been looked after very well.
Matthew.

[Shane Ross]

[carlos castro] “in your post it says you travel with G minis, to off load P2’s, how many and what size?”

I have (4) 320 GB models. Use them in pairs, and they usually work for the entire shoot.

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

Firewire…because my offloading machine is a Powerbook G4 and it can bus power firewire drives, but not USB. MacBook Pros can bus power USB.

Shane

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[Jeremy Garchow]

[Matthew Romanis] “What do you think of the story getting around that un-powered drives start to “evaporate” over time?
Is there any corroborated evidence? “

I don’t know if there’s evidence. I have had similar experinces where the computer is way old, way dusty and sitting for years. Turn it on and it works.

We too, spin up all of our drives every month or two. So far so good, but with all these drives, I am sure the math can work out that one will fail. Everything is pretty much doubled at this point, so we should be covered. We are probably going to look at an LTO system as well, and we will keep a set of tapes offsite, but we already have a lot to catch up on. I am hoping that eventually solid state drives will take over the spinning disk, but we might have to wait a few years on that. Not only do we need offsite redundant storage, but we also need a database to track all the footage and tell us where it is once it’s offline and archived. I’ll be looking around at NAB for sure.

Jeremy