Storage options

[Jeff Carpenter]

What do you do? Editing something for the 6 o’clock news is a lot different than working on a childern’s ballet that’s due in 2 to 3 weeks.

The meaning of the word “reliable” can very a LOT. I use firewire drives which are seen as many as “unreliable” but the fact is, I’m working on ballets and if my drive crashes I spend an extra few hours re-digitizing my footage. It’s all in my home basement so it’s no big deal. This could totally kill someone else with a tight deadline, though.

That being said, in 3 years I’ve had my “unreliable” firewire drives mess up 2 or 3 times total. It is my understanding that a SATA RAID should be even better than that. If those kind of numbers make you nervous than your dealer has a point. If these numbers make you laugh and say “is that all?” then I think you’re fine to pick whatever you want and just ignore the dealer. It all comes down to your business and just how terrible (and expensive) a drive failure would be for you.

[Mick Ruane]

Thanks Jeff, what do I do? I make documentaries for TV, corporate and educational DVDs etc. I generally use DV. digibeta, Beta SP but have started using H-DV and master onto on DVD or DigiBeta.

Mick Ruane
Bog Dog Film & video productions
Galway
Ireland

[Jeff Carpenter]

It’s probably possible to do a little experiment. Make a guess on how much video you’d have on your drives at any one time. If that were to get lost, how much time would it take to re-digitize it all? How much would that cost you in salary (either for yourself or others) and would it put you behind in your overall work or would you simply work overnight? Would losnig a day of work screw up your deadlines or would you just have to work longer hours for the rest of the week?

Try to come up with a monetary value for a hard drive failure. Once you have THAT you can start to see if spending extra now is really worth it for you or not. For me, the “cost” of such failures is so very low that I have no reason to spend more than firewire drives. It’s good to really figure out just how bad a failure would be for yourself before making a decision like this.

[Walter Biscardi]

We just started running a LaCie S2S SATA array in one of our suites 2 months ago. It’s been cutting 8bit Uncompressed material all day, 5 days a week without a hiccup. It’s a 1TB model.

We run a Medea FCR2X Fibre Channel array in the other suite for our HD broadcast work. It’s been running almost 2 years without a hiccup.

I’ve heard some reliability issues regarding SATA in the past but so far the LaCie is performing perfectly. That room is cutting corporate projects while the Fibre Channel array is on broadcast heavy deadline work. With broadcast deadline material I still would only recommend Fibre Channel, though I’m very partial to the Med

[Arnie Schlissel]

You really need to spend a little time mapping out your immediate needs, & your future needs. Do you need to grow your storage in the near future? Do you need to network your storage? The XRaid allows for both of these options. The MediaVault may be networkable, but that’s not officially supported by Apple right now. Both solutions (& other, similar arrays) offer plenty of bandwidth for HD.

SATA RAIDs can be built very cheaply. Right now, though the main drawback is that there are very few options for RAID levels 3 or 5, which are ‘safer’ than RAID 0, but still offer a most of the speed of RAID 0.

It’s also difficult to get enough drives together on a single SATA controller card to give you the bandwidth you need for uncompressed HD. You need 8 drives striped together as RAID 0, & not too many cards let you plug in to that many drives. All of those cards require using 2 slots or require you to put some of those drives inside the G5, which isn’t really designed to hold that many drives.

Now, there’s a new SATA II standard emerging that resolves some of these issues with faster bandwidth & port multiplication. But there’s at least 3 or 4 different connectors, so you need to match your card to your enclosure very carefully. Also, I don’t know if there’s any support for RAID 3 or RAID 5 yet (but I’d be willing to guess that it’s in the works).

As a compromise, take a look at getting an array from Promise, Arena, StoreCase, etc. You can buy some of these ’empty’ but wired for either fiber channel or U320 SCSI and install your own drives into them. It’s more costly than SATA, but still half the price of an XRaid.

Arnie
https://www.arniepix.com

[David Roth weiss]

Mick,

Search back a few months for a post I made entitled “Roll Your Own” 1.2 Terrabyte SATA. You could install four of the new Maxline Pro 500gb drives for just $320 each to get your 2tb of storage. Check out the Firmtek review on barefeats.com, https://www.barefeats.com/hard58.html. Barefeats say the Firmtek SATA solutions make Firewire 800 obsolete. Your dealer isn’t really up to date if thinks SATA is unreliable.

DRW

[Mick Ruane]

Thanks all for the advice. It gives me something to think about.

Mick Ruane
Bog Dog Film & Video Productions
Galway
Ireland

[Paul Belanger]

Hi Mick
I’m actually selling a Huge System MediaVault U320 1.2 TB now on eBay.
It’s the one that looks like a mini G5.
I bought it in October 2005, just 6 months ago.
I needed the room for a special project I was on and now I don’t
need it anymore.
it’s in great condition and not problems.
Just trying to get my money back before prices drop to nothing.
I’m asking $2500, I think they are going for $3300
https://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=8783977608

Thanks
Paul

[Barkt]

[walter biscardi] “We just started running a LaCie S2S SATA array in one of our suites 2 months ago. It’s been cutting 8bit Uncompressed material all day, 5 days a week without a hiccup. It’s a 1TB model.”

Hi Walter,

Sorry to drag you back to this discussion but I was wondering if the S2S had proven to be a realiable device for the capture and playback of 10bit uncompressed material.

Thanks