recommendations to production for storage/shuttle drive

[Matthew Love]

hey guys, quick question.

I'm helping a pal plan out a 4 week shoot (20 days total) on 2 epics. Probably shooting 8:1 a majority and 5:1 on some keying shots (far and few).

I told him if he goes with 2 4TB RAIDs that should get him through the first week and they can plan accordingly from there. Money is an issue so I dont think going with large 12TB master and backup systems would work.

I told him that 2 4TB RAIDs (master and backup) would be sufficient for a week to 1.5 weeks possibly 2 weeks and he can use a 1TB drive as the shuttle drive for the Prores422 HQ transcodes.

Just wondering what you guys on here would recommend.

thanks!

[Tobias Straka]

Well 4TB for a week seems too little to me - even if you have a conservative director and DP, you'll constantly be looking at the remaining free disk space... The last couple movies I DIT-ed on constantly shot anywhere between 800GB and 2TB. Also, you have to consider that the read/write speed will suffer if that RAID fills up. So I would definitely recommend having more than 4TB per backup per week. Can it be done with 4TB? Sure, but the production will somewhat restrict itself. The director deciding whether or not to do another take based on remaining disk space is not a good thing...

If money is a big issue, you can always just get a couple bare drives and a docking station and do multiple backups manually.

[Cory Petkovsek]

I would get on newegg and order a bunch of 7200rpm 2-3TB bare drives and a portable drive chassis for each. Something like a rosewill for $50 that has your fastest connection port (usb3, esata, etc). You'll have to install the drives yourself, but that's easy and cheap. Then just make sure you have two copies of everything and plenty of labels. Or the docking station Tobias suggested is good too.

For workflow, experiment with copying on your system. You could start a copy from the media to one drive. Then start another to another drive. On windows I have seen this pull the second copy from the cache so it does not saturate the pipe to the media drive with two streams (ie. the transfer rate of the first copy stays the same). This gets you two copies quickly so you can recycle the card.

On our last feature we were doing around 250GB per day per camera of 5k FF.

Cory

[Sulekh Suman]

I used Glyph Drives with eSATA and I am quite happy with the performance. 4Tb gives you approximately 23hrs at 8:1 which is about 12 hrs/ camera. That should definitely be good for Week 1 including some sequences at 5:1.

[Jarek Zabczynski]

I've been using these guys on set and between the studio for offload and transfer.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firew.../Gmax_Portable

[Patrick Tresch]

For the cheapest price ratio: I would buy a 12TB drive to have the whole film in R3D on one disk (easy for the conform process) and the backup on separate 3TB dokable disks.
12TB could hold the hole shooting if you shoot max 500GB/day.

http://www.g-technology.com/products/g-speed-q.cfm

Pat

PS: does anyone have a Redcode compression GB/minutes calculator?

[Johnny Friday]

Doesn't sound like near enough storage...and you don't want to shoot say over 75% of your hard drive....i try to stick with 70% to 75% max of my HDD space, so a 4TB drive called FULL to me is at 3tb. Otherwise, i've had complications with slow media. And, your backup....but wow, calling it a 4TB per week sounds like very little shooting.

[Gary Paul Walker]

I'm likely to be going down the 'copying to dual bare drives via a docking station ' (one master and one backup) route... Of course I'll be using 7200rpm drives, but does anyone have any perspective on the transfer speeds? I'll be connectivng via USB3 and was wondering if the speed of the hard drives themselves will likely bottleneck my transfer rates

[Jarek Zabczynski]

USB3 is faster than all spinning hard drives. So yes, the drive is the bottleneck.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I used Glyph Drives with eSATA and I am quite happy with the performance. 4Tb gives you approximately 23hrs at 8:1 which is about 12 hrs/ camera. That should definitely be good for Week 1 including some sequences at 5:1.

Er... That's some seriously low output specifications there. We know nothing about their shooting schedule, subject matter, etc.. If I were going into a shoot not knowing how much I might actually shoot each day, I would do 2TB (maybe 3TB) per camera per day. And I would double that up for redundancy.

We're stabbing in the dark here anyway, we know nothing about the production, nothing about other hardware they want to use and connect their storage to, nothing... For productions looking to offload to physical hard drives for storage, I highly recommend using a 2.5" RED Station module (or two) and using 1TB 2.5" 7200rpm HDDs for the storage. If going with 3TB HDDs, the WD Caviar Green are an excellent value and relatively quick for variable spindle, economy drives. If bare drives aren't desirable for shuttling about, then there are lots of options for throwing one of those drives in an enclosure from Rosewill, Bytecc, and many others to give it a host of common interfaces on one unit. Although, it's often cheaper to just buy an external HDD to begin with.

For RAIDs, you're starting to get expensive and that may or may not be what the production needs. You need higher calibre HDDs to provide the right performance and reliability in a RAID setting -- no more Caviar Green or Blue drives, but you really need the Blacks (or Seagate Barracuda or Hitachi UltraStar). Preferably the RAID-specific models, to do it right. I think their primary offload and footage manipulation / transfer station(s) should have a decent RAID to work with. Otherwise the data bottleneck could kill the production if they are shooting any respectable amount of footage, doubly so with the two cameras. Actual storage, shuttle drives, backups, etc.. don't need to be RAID.

Single HDDs are going to bottleneck all transfers to around 65~95 MB/s depending on various factors, but probably an average of about 75~80MB/s. Doesn't matter if USB3 or eSATA are used. Mechanical HDDs only go so fast and one by itself is not "fast".