Hard Drives for Documentary

[Howard Buksbaum]

Hello,

I'm shooting a doc at 4k and I'm trying to look for the best storage solution for a long format project. In the past I've had luck with Glyph drives and Drobo. Just curious if there are any other recommendations.

Thanks,
Howie

 

[Marcus Struzina]

I've been using Bare drives in drive docks for a while, that way you can afford to make 2 or even 3 discrete copies and store and transport them separately. I've been carrying the drives in the original anti static bags with dessicant packets, taped up and wrapped in bubble wrap and hard foam and boxed. simple cheap and seems to work. In my mind the key on the road is to have multiple copies stored separately.

 

[jimhare]

Hi Howard,

Really depends on if you are in the field or have access to your home base each day. If you are local then I agree with Marcus. I use bare drives and make several copies.

If you are in the field this isn't a good idea. You don't want to be moving these around. For my field work I got a Retina MacBook Pro so I could have USB3/Thunderbolt and a good field setup for RCX/DaVinci.

For drives I've been using portable Western Digital USB3 drives and they are amazing! I get 100MB/sec throughput so I can offload a 128GB card in about 15 minutes, and they have been perfectly reliable. I copy across 3 drives for redundancy and haven't lost a single frame.

You can also explore Thunderbolt enclosures but all of a sudden you are talking about infrastucture, cases and so on, where the MBP and 3 x 2TB drives is a piece of cake to move around. I have tiny pelican cases for the drives/cables and the MBP lives in my bag.

There are enough headaches moving the camera gear around without an equal hassle for wrangling!

 

[Shiblon Wixom]

Docs tend to shoot at least twice as much material as a feature, in many cases several times as much. I would suggest at least 16 TB of storage, maybe even 24 TB.

 

[Shiblon Wixom]

Either go with a large raid tower or rack mount raids and a transportable rack case. If you need to be mobile and space is a concern go with portable drives, buy a new set and ship home when full.

 

[Marcus Struzina]

Jim's point is good, if your actually offloading a lot in the field without power then a bunch of sealed drives that power off the usb is a much better idea. I'm also superstitiously attached to the Western Digital drives.

 

[Phil Holland]

Pretty much exactly what Jim said up there.

For remote work, meaning out in the field with laptop, I'm using those same USB 3.0 Western Digital Drives. They even sell fancy little shock enclosures that protect from a smidge of rain too.

I carry 2 or 4 2TB drives on me in my laptop backpack for data redundancy. That usually gets me 2-14 days of storage depending on what I'm doing. I usually shoot somewhere between 1 to 2 hours of material a day. Sometimes way more, sometimes way less. Again, depends.

Come home, offload/upload material, and get to work.

 

[emil tanem]

Any recommendations on a non-mac laptop that will actually give 100+ MB/s to an external HDD (using usb3) ?

I have very good experience with Seagate Barracuda 3TB disks. They do about 120MB/s. I believe they just changed name though.