Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Register Log in
  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Sturdy storage, best price?

K

Keith Alan Morris

Well-known member
Joined
Feb 18, 2007
Messages
573
Reaction score
0
Points
16
Location
New Orleans!
I want to know what the best storage solution is for the money. I want to buy today online and have it shipped asap. CF card reader too. Something that hooks up to a Red drive too. What is working for people out there? I want redundancy too...

Just bought: Macbook Pro
15.4" Wide 2 GB 2.4 GHz
Core 2 Duo 160 GB 5400 SuperDrive
8x DVD+R/CD-RW NVIDIA GeForce 8600M
GT 256MB SDRAM

Need to upgrade it and switch graphics cards too, I surmise...
 
km9000 said:
I want to know what the best storage solution is for the money. I want to buy today online and have it shipped asap. CF card reader too. Something that hooks up to a Red drive too. What is working for people out there? I want redundancy too...
Click to expand...

Hard to know what solution you may need without knowing your intended use. Take a look at the CalDigit products (www.caldigit.com) -- they are treating me well. Easy to buy them from B&H, Custom Supply and elsewhere. I use the CalDigit SV2R eSATA RAID w/2x750GB in a RAID-1 as my offload box with RED. Connected to the CalDigit eSATA ExpressCard34 adapter on my Macbook Pro.

For a CF reader, I like the Lexar Professional FW800 model. It's been treating me well.

km9000 said:
Need to upgrade it and switch graphics cards too, I surmise...
Click to expand...

That Macbook Pro should be OK... My only concern would be the video card, I've read mixed reviews of REDCINE on the 8600M and have seen no definitive answers. Unfortunately, upgrading a Macbook Pro means buying a new one. The new ones still have the same video chipset. On yours, you could double up to 4GB, which is probably not necessary unless this system is your primary workstation. HDD upgrades are a real PITA as you have to essentially take the entire system apart.

My MBP is still a 15.4" 2.33GHz w/2GB, 160GB 5400rpm HDD and ATI X1600 video. It's nearly 2 years old, but it runs REDCINE OK -- still has its issues like grey clip thumbnails on occasion, screen flickers, etc.. I have no intention of upgrading this system until I can get a notebook with a 2.8GHz quad-core CPU, 8GB RAM, Blu-Ray...
 
shooting a feature, so i'm going to have ALOT of footage for my DIT to wrangle. and a limited budget.... 3 week shoot, days and nights.
 
If you can keep your DIT station in one spot or on a cart, I'd recommend a larger RAID like the CalDigit HDPro systems. Or one from these guys:

http://www.enhance-tech.com/quicklaunch/workstation_SATA_ex.html

Definitely go RAID-5 and have a solution for backups of the RAID during times you're not shooting, perhaps maintaining duplicate RAID units.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
I use the CalDigit SV2R eSATA RAID w/2x750GB in a RAID-1 as my offload box with RED. Connected to the CalDigit eSATA ExpressCard34 adapter on my Macbook Pro.

For a CF reader, I like the Lexar Professional FW800 model. It's been treating me well.
Click to expand...

i checked on b&h:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=search&A=search&Q=&shs=caldigit+esata+raid&ci=0

that seems quite affordable and in my price range. you got two of those, right? how much footage can I load on 2 750gb? (and then double that, right? for redundancy?)

so far, i'm looking at this:
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=search&A=search&Q=&shs=caldigit+esata+raid&ci=0

and this:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/ME8SRS10TB32/

for storage. what do you guys think? the second ones are sexier but more expensive.
 
I just got the 4TB G speed es, but i was planning on using the HPX3000 and now the production that i am on decided to shoot with RED things definitely have changed. I was going to use the drive as a Raid 1 and just Mirror two drives but i dont think i will have enough space now. Its an indie feature and if i did my math right, if we shot 15 hrs of 4K it would be 1.9 TB of just Raw footage?

What would you guys recommend that i do? The G Speed seems kind of useless now....
 
Tv_Red said:
I just got the 4TB G speed es, but i was planning on using the HPX3000 and now the production that i am on decided to shoot with RED things definitely have changed. I was going to use the drive as a Raid 1 and just Mirror two drives but i dont think i will have enough space now. Its an indie feature and if i did my math right, if we shot 15 hrs of 4K it would be 1.9 TB of just Raw footage?

What would you guys recommend that i do? The G Speed seems kind of useless now....
Click to expand...

one guy said he has 10 of these and he's fine:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/ME8SRS10TB32/

thats what i'm going to do i think unless someone has a better idea...
 
km9000 said:
one guy said he has 10 of these and he's fine:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/ME8SRS10TB32/
Click to expand...

Careful with those. They're 2 x 500GB in a RAID-0. One drive inside the unit fails and you lose all the data on both HDDs. No redundancy there.

I would also recommend drives that have eSATA interface or the option to do either eSATA or FW800. That way you can attach your CF reader and/or RED Drive to the FW800 port on the Macbook Pro and your other storage to eSATA. You can lose performance and introduce more possibilities of error when daisy-chaining FW devices.

As pointed out in another thread around here, if you use a RED drive and daisy-chain it with other FW devices, make sure you power it via AC and place it first on the chain. Many FW devices are not equipped to handle passing a full 12VDC and you can cook them pretty good if you're passing full power over the FW bus.

I didn't go into much detail in my last post, but I really like the CalDigit 2-Drive SV2R unit. The 750GB drives have been providing a very good price to performance ratio for use in a RAID-1 (mirrored drives for redundancy). The drives can quickly slide out the rear of the unit on trays (not hot-swappable though) and you can change them out pretty quickly.

Off-loading to two 750GB HDDs in this way lets me store two RED Drives full of information plus a dozen CF card images. I slide the two drives out, remove them from the trays and replace with new ones. That way, I have two copies of my data on two separate 750GB SATA drives that I can then put in an anti-static bag and place in foam or bubble-wrap for transport or shipping. Actually, if I were going to be shipping them or doing a lot of transport, I would make even more copies or do something different.

Obviously, you could use 500GB or 1TB drives if you would like. 500GB doesn't make much sense to me if you'll be using RED Drives, but 1TB can hold 3 full RED DRIVES.

You can buy additional drive modules for the CalDigit, which are drives already mounted on trays. This gets real expensive. I just swap the trays to new drives when replacing. I've been having great success with 750GB Hitachi drives. I would assume the Seagate Barracuda drives would work too, but have not tried them.
 
I think im going to stick with the G Speed es that i have and Mirror a set of drives together (1 TB) as my working drive and just have the other two drives as stand alone as two 1 TB drives and use those as my Red Raw download drives. I will have another 2 TB G Raid drive to back up all the Red Raw Footage to back continuous through out the shoot and then just keep it some where safe and hopefully i wont have to use it.

I really do not like daisy chaining drives together, plus with the drive that you recommended i would need a bunch of them.

Thanks!
 
I second Jeff on CalDigit. We've got multiple HDPro's and they are like tanks. Good company as well- very responsive.
 
Also, we like HDPro because it's a true hardware RAID. The Mac really doesn't both itself with doing the RAID (used to run a striped xServe- NEVER EVER do that again!!!). Don't think the G-speeds are self-contained hardware.
 
rservera said:
Paulee, what went wrong with Apples XServe RAID? We're about to buy a 10 TB XServe RAID...
Click to expand...

Can't comment on Paul's experience with XServe (or if he was talking about the server or the RAID?). But I will say this... Friends don't let friends buy an XServe RAID. Way too expensive for what they are, much better and faster options out there. Apple has discontinued all XServe RAID products now and will cease support as all current support contracts (or ones still eligible to be activated) run out.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top