Need of a new hard drive

[Stephen Mann]

Drobo has a reputation for being slow. I’ve never heard of G-Raid. (Must be for the Mac).

I’ve done hundreds of projects over the years and never needed RAID. I just buy another 1TB bare drive (currently $59 at Micro Center and New Egg) for each project and drop it into a desktop docking station. When the project is done, I clean up the redundant and unnecessary files then copy the whole project to a 2Tb drive for storage. I can usually fit 5 or more project archives on a 2Tb drive. Both are saved for a few months then the 1Tb drive gets reused on another project. (3Tb drives should drop below $100 by the end of the year).

If you are going to be using the drive for editing, stay away from the green drives. They slow down and even shut down to save energy. Not something you want to happen when editing.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Ralph Hajik]

Hi Stephen,

Your professional information is very much appreciated.

Ralph Hajik

[Dave Lozinski]

I have an external 2.5″ 750GB USB 3 drive that I put projects (and all relevant material on) when complete. It’s nice because it’s portable and USB 3 is backwards compatible.

When the drive fills up, I copythe last two older projects to a DVD (I always make 2 copies of the DVD in case one gets scratched or something).

If you’re using an external drive, you definitely don’t want a “greeny” because it won’t be plugged in and used much to justify.

Any drive you get should be at least 7200rpm and now a days either USB3 or SATA III (if you have an external SATA port to plug into).

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https://www.davelozinski.com
https://www.davelozinski.com/DemoReel/
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[Paul Goelz]

[Stephen Mann] “If you are going to be using the drive for editing, stay away from the green drives. They slow down and even shut down to save energy. Not something you want to happen when editing.”

Are you sure they do that while actually in use? I have been using nothing but green drives and have not noticed any issues that I am aware of so far. They do spin down when idle but they seem to work fine during an edit or render session.

Paul

Paul Goelz
Rochester Hills, MI USA
paul at pgoelz dot com

[Mike Thomas ii]

I happen to be benchmarking a few of my hard drives this lazy Sunday. These are the results from three Western Digital drives in different configurations.

WD1002FAEX Black (1 TB – 64MB Cache)
Motherboard connected: 104.7 MB/s, 12.7 ms

WD5000AAKS Black (500 MB – 16MB Cache)
Motherboard connected: 73.9 MB/s, 12.9 ms

WD10EADS Green (1 TB – 32MB Cache)
eSata II connected: 79.8 MB/s, 19.3 ms
USB 2.0 connected: 32.7 MB/s, 19.4 ms

The WD Green drive is in a NextStar eSata/USB 2.0 External case. As you can see, there is a huge difference in performance depending on the connection type.

note: you will generally get better USB connection speed when using a rear port directly on the mobo.

[Ralph Hajik]

Hi Everyone,

I went out and bought the Thermaltake Black Widow hard drive eSATA + USB Docking Station from Micro Center. Plus, the Western Digital 1TB 7200 RPM hard drive. This is all great information from all and that’s what makes CreativeCow so popular.

Ralph Hajik
LastingMemoriesR4ever.com

[Dave Haynie]

I have an 8TB Drobo as my “vault” drive. Not usually used for rendering, but very handy for storing all the things I might otherwise archive. This is a second-gen model, so it’s been in use for some years now.

Stephen’s right, they aren’t fast. Part of that’s the interface… this one is on Firewire 800. And if you haven’t tried to tweak a FW800 interface to actually run at 800Mb/s on Windows 7, you haven’t mastered the art of Stupid Windows Tricks. But that does at least push it nearly twice the speed you’ll see with USB.

Supposedly, the newer Drobos are a bit faster, and run on better interfaces, like GigE and SATA. In practice, every RAID with redundancy is going to write slower and seek slower. Some do read faster, but that’s very much not the point of the Drobo.

The actual point of the Drobo is data security. That’s not a substitute for a backup, but it can save you from having to restore data in the event of a drive failure. Curiously, I had one of those drive failures on Sunday… one 2TB drive failed. I dropped a new one in there on Monday, and it should be back up to RAID mode in a 2-3 days. But even now, nothing’s lost (newer models have the option of two drive redundancy).

For regular work, I use non-RAID SATA drives… large enough, and fast enough. Just be sure to run backups regularly. Also, I don’t run them into the ground… after a couple of years, I clone in a new drive and relegate the old ones (still good, of course) as project drive. I have a drive bay, which lets you use SATA drives like cartridges, and devote a whole drive to any major project, which then serves as a full project backup once the project is done. The project originals and results will also be on BD-R, and on the Drobo. Particularly in the post-tape days, you want everything in multiple locations ASAP.

-Dave

[Ralph Hajik]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for your honesty and nice write up on the Drobo. You really don’t know all the facts about the Drobo unless you actually own one like yourself.
Thanks again

Ralph Hajik