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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 Tools for Data Wrangling?

DIY Drives, they are cheap to put together but obviously require some research to get the best out of them,

I'm going down the 500GB route but I'm trying to get them to be 7,200RPM and eSATA.

Lexar firewire 800 reader in Macbook Pro,eSata out to 500GB drives.

At the end of it all I'd probably have one massive drive to hand off on and back up the 500GB's onto a server and other drives just to be sure.

The bigger drive would most probably be G-RAID. I'm going to test this out all during christmas but so far this is the ideal plan for doing the DIT side of RED for me.
 
3. We are considering 500 GB G-Tech drives. Any opinions as to if that is a good or bad purchase decision.
NO DONT BUY THOSE.

I am currently on a feature which against my recommendation purchased 12 500gb G-Raid Mini drives.
These are a new redone drive, and they were brand new purchased 3 1/2 weeks ago.
I had 4 fail on me on set, un-mounting and not being able to use the FW800 port. The USB port worked fine but that was not fast enough for our needs.
I rejected all 12 drives and sent them back.

I spoke to G-Tech in person and on the phone multiple times about these drives and was only able to make minimal progress, basically none. I just wont buy them anymore.
I am now working off of 1TB and 500GB Lacie drives. Not my favorite but working.
Personally I feel more comfortable working off of multiple 2TB or larger drives depending on project and size of media.
And backup 4 independent drives deep.

1 Master editorial
2 Backup editorial
3 Backup floating for sound or fx
4 Stays in a vault or Producers house, away from the others.
& LTO if you can afford it. That would replace 4th backup.

And
Just listen to Morning Glory
HE PUTS IT DOWN.
His replies are fantastic you'll be fine following what he says.


Good Luck
Luis Flores Jr
 
I'd like to drop a comment on LaCie. Their enclosure are nice, but the fact that they're sporting Maxtor drives is a major turn off for me. I've heard of many LaCie drives failing (but haven't had many, and thus didn't witness any failures myself). On the other hand, I've had many different Maxtor drives, in both OEM and boxed packages all the way from the end of the 90's when they bought up Quantum (if some of you remember 'em) and have seen more than 50% of them fail within three years in both mild home use and heavier duty server use. On the other hand, I've had many Quantum (one is sitting on my desk, a Fireball 3.5), Seagate and Western Digital last for many many years.

In a nutshell : Maxtor is empirically supported crap. LaCie uses Maxtor drives.

P.S. I did see LaCie firewire port failures on several occasions.

Extra extra, people looking for good drives on the cheap should have a look at Fantom Drives, they make several sizes of decent hard drives and sport Western Digital for around 100CAD$/TB, eSata and other interface options available, raid-0/1 units available as well. I have several of these units at home and had some short film productions buy those and they rock
 
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All external drives suck. I have never and will never come across a External that doesn't use some sort of Bridge board. Thats the whole point, its one more electronic piece that can fail and usually does long before the drive does... Just keep the appropriate cables and screwdrivers with you.
 
I think the best solution is a RAID 5 or 6 enclosure and Multiple small (500GB) drives. I don't know what the guys are thinking that don't like RAID for onset. I highly recommend it. It is way more likely for a drive to fail than to have a RAID controller fail. I have not had a RAID controller fail in the last 10 years and I have used a lot of them. I have been using RocketRaid cards in my edit stations since they started supporting RAID 5. Lot of them over the years and no problems. I would like to hear what controllers people are having fail.

I send the 500GB drives off to the post house each day and keep the RAID on set. This is the RAID I recommend. They are small and affordable and fast enough.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/RAID/Desktop/

I have some others that hold five drives and work great, but they are bigger.

http://www.firewiredirect.com/product/679/

If I could get productions to pay for them I would keep a couple of the RAID enclosures on set and one 500-1000GB drive for each day of the shoot. Most of my features don't shoot more than 500GB per day, but I have had a couple shows that did so I get 1TB most of the time just in case.

I have to keep one copy of the entire footage on set, because I get asked for all kinds of things that require me to work with older footage.

I use the Sonnet eSATA Pro card in my 15" Macbook Pro. I have a Sonnet eSATA card (non-Pro) as a backup, and it seems to me slower that the Pro card with the same drives. Since the Sonnet cards are Port Multiplier I also have a couple little PM boxes:

http://www.addonics.com/products/host_controller/extpm.asp

That allows me to connect up to 10 eSATA drives to my laptop, though 3 or 4 is the most I ever use.

When I travel I take spare everything. Right now I am in Romania and I brought 2 15" Powerbooks, 2 Sonnet cards, lots of cables. I make sure I have spare everything just in case.

For Software I use 3cP, Clipfinder, QTcoffee, and all the Red tools. I have R3D Data Manager, but I only use it to format drives. 3cP works for download for me. I need to send more feed back to the 3cP guys so I can make it the only app I need. Things like I want a color tab to modify all the Red color settings. Right now I use Clipfinder for that. You can do basic Red color modification, but it is not as easy as using the other color settings in 3cP and not all the controls in the SDK.

Also Rendering from 3cP is very limited, so I do my dailies from Clipfinder. I have had 3cP make me custom render settings, but they seem to use Quicktime instead of the Red SDK to render and the quality is not even close. Clipfinder gives me way more options and does the render through Redline, so the quality is great.

Every now and then I need to use Red Alert to fix a clip that didn't finish correctly or has a problem. Just open the clip in Red Alert and it seems to repair the file and then it works everywhere.


Hope that helps.


Mahalo,
Dusty
 
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