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  • 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 :)

Best External Hard Drive for Editing and Storing Red Footage

I like the G-Raid 3 3TB drive
Its 3TB raided drive with E-sata ideal for moving large amounts of footage and ideal for RED workflows, It also has FW 800 and 400
I have used Seagate, and Maxtors which i used to love but now I have seen every single brand go bad in my experience with RED footage
So no matter what you get make 110% sure you have identical backups no matter what you do.

Stay away from Western Digital just stay away from it.
good luck
 
I checked out the G-raid3 and a 3 terrabyte space is only $699. Wow pretty cheap.

Also, for Back-up drives that would be locked up in the vault, is there a Cheaper hard drive out there?

Thanks
 
buy seagate 7200 rpm 32m cache 1tb internal drives from bestbuy or frys or macmall for about 110 bucks, buy a estata enclosure at frys or macmall for 20 bucks (make sure you keep it cool), fill that drive with footage and file it away...
 
G-RAID G-SAFE Mirrored 1TB drive for the field... make yourself a redundant copy on location through Firewire800; save yourself the distress of having your primary drive go down before you dump back at your editing station...
 
i am suggesting, for archive only, buy just the guts and save the pretty packaging for the set.
 
On set i've used a 1TB G-Raid 2, and backed it up to a 1TB LaCie Big Disk Extreme. The G-Raid 2 is a nice drive to use as a scratch disk, its raid 0 and fw800 so its fast, and it has a good cooling system so it doesn't run hot.
 
So is that new four bay G-Tech out? And if so what's the real sustained read speed when set up as RAID-5? I suppose all of these are hardware RAIDs.
 
I have this unit for basic work: http://www.newertech.com/products/gmax.php The big advantage is it is mirrored raid via hardware. Its block mirroring so if one drive goes bad the other is ready to go. Its Fireware 800, 400, USB. And the drives can be swapped very easily. The unit is very rugged. And, it will take any eSata HD (the drives must be the same model though).

That is a unit I happen to like. But, its not a super high end unit. Just nice and reliable. You could also check out the DROBO. I have not tried that. But it is fully redundant and can have its storage space expanded dynamically. The new version claims to work for Video Editing.

When you say for editing it really depends on project size, and resolution, and task. For instance doing straight edits on ProRezHD is not going to require the same as doing composites on frame files, etc. The low/mid end would be G-Tech FireWire/eSata etc. The high end would be a FibreChannel RAID unit with volume striping (meaning the data is written across multiple drives). You prob will be fine with FireWire etc. But, there is a range and its good to know about. The higher end would be something like this: http://store.apple.com/us_smb_78313/browse/home/shop_mac/mac_accessories/promise . That will chug through data at a cost :)

Also, you prob. want to split the work across drives. Files that cannot be replaced (such as raw footage, and project files) should be on some sort of redundant drives. But, all the intermediate files, such as renders, corrected output does not need to be. Now if you have no limit on budget then you can get high end drives for everything. But, the separation can save cost and make archiving easier: you really don't need to save your scratch render files, and its much easier to send a vital subset of files offsite for backup.

The other reason to split across drive units is performance. The controllers on each drive and each drive unit can be bottlenecks etc. You can focus your money on where the resources need to be. While saving cash on areas that don't require as high performance (archiving files for instance) but might need more redundancy.

For actual drive selection check out http://www.barefeats.com. This person does Mac performance tests and also tests out various RAID units with the Mac. There are other sites but this one is a good starting point.

But, really any RAID unit with a standard controller (Firewire, SCSI, or FibreChannel) will work. So you are not limited to Mac solutions. Other than the cases looking nicer I'm not sure mac focused brands like G-Tech, LaCie, etc. offers much advantage over other brands. They build solid units; but the don't develop the electronics inside. I'm saying this because if you are at the exploratory stage you might as well really look around.
 
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