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storage solutions
i am a designer at a local tv station. i am researching the equipment necessary for our inevitable transition to high def. i haven’t been able to get a lot of feedback regarding what the best storage solutions are. basically, i know i’m going to have to dramatically increase the amount of storage space we have both for designing and for backup. i want to have multiple terabytes per workstation. i know that gets into the realm of RAIDS unless i buy a ton of external firewire drives, which i don’t want to do. this isn’t storage for editing, this is storage for designing. i don’t think we will be doing much if any high def editing. the closest to that would be working in after effects or cinema 4D, photoshop, illustrator, etc.. so editing speed isn’t as important as just having the storage space to work and to be able to back up that work. my top candidates are apple’s xserve raid, one of g-technologies products or one of HUGE systems (ciprico) products. price is obviously an issue but reliability is more important…i’m willing to pay more for a device that is more stable.
does anyone have any opinions on the products i’ve mentioned or any other products? what do you use? what’s got a good reputation (i.e. i’ve lost faith in lacie’s external firewire drives…i’ve had several fail on me…i’ve found maxtor’s to be much more stable)?
an example of what i’m thinking is getting a 7TB xserve RAID per workstation, using half for daily use and mirror that with the other half (this in addition to the internal hard drives)
if it matters, we are on Macs. right now they are dual g5s running 10.4.8 but i plan on buying all new macs with the above storage purchase. i’ll be buying pretty much the top of the line MacPro at the time (at least a year from now), loading it with ram, internal storage, etc. (yes, i still want extra terabytes of storage in addition to the internal hard drives…i know we’ll use it).
thank you in advance for your advice and suggestions.
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1 Reply
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X Serve RAIDs are very Solid and you won’t have to worry about apple not supporting them in the future. Have you thought about a SAN or NAS system so that everyone could collaborate on projects together? It might save you money having centeral storage and backing that up to tape instead of mirroring everyones storage, you could also keep a RAID dedicated to doing HD projects so that all your editing stations could do HD, like you siad if your not doing too much HD production yet then it’d make sense to not have to make that purchase of HD storage if not everyones going to take advantage of it. Besides imagine all of the time you could save from not having to look on all of those firewire drives, there’s another solution for that coming out soon as well, check out Postmap from SNS
https://www.studionetworksolutions.com/products/product_detail.php?pi=7I’ve setup plenty of stations doing HD from start to finish,
Feel free to call or email me offline if you’d like to talk about things in depthShane Sokolosky
Circuit AccessEmail – heysomthin@aol.com
Phone – (714) 599-1611
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