Drives Drives Drives

[MikeHedge]

so....

looking for a solution.

I have about 75 hard drives here. mostly external drives firewire 400 and 800 and some USB some formatted PC (NTFS) and some formatted Mac (XFS?) (but I have "macdrive" software... yay!

so....

how do people keep track of all the files across so many drives?

I have footage from 2007 I am now trying to edit.... but guess what? which drive is the footage on? I have to pick one of the 75 drives....

anyways... I'm looking for a PC solution like Media Indexer on the Mac....

I want to create a index of each drive... then unplug that drive... then I want to search for "Hawaii" or for a file name and have it say "that media is located on drive 63"

Bam! I connect drive 63 and start editing!!!!!!

Also looking for a multi bay JBOD set up where I can back up stuff from all these drives... (some are old 200GB or 250GB ones....)

thanks!

Mike

 

[Andrew clemson]

Wouldnt it be easier to move to larger storage units, and have less of them, or even just one? How much space would you need?

 

[MikeHedge]

yep. about 50 terabytes...

still looking for a cheap 8 bay enclosure unit I can add my own drives to.

 

[Brandon Fraley]

drobo?

http://www.drobo.com/products/drobopro/

 

[Alex Carr]

You should invest in LTO 4 Tape, Some of Those old drives may not be so lucky... And when you need something restore it, it actually inst that time consuming at all.

With a SAS Controller Card, you can invest in a 16TB RAID Array that will help you keep a good portion of that media available. And not just available, but pretty much permanent. Much longer life than any of those external Drives. Plus you can create archives of your entire system instead of continuing to fish after drives and then there's the 'find the right power supply, in a basket of like 50 others...' Lately I've been pretty adamant about backing up everything I do to LTO Tape.

 

[Jeremy Neish]

I've used these:
http://www.pc-pitstop.com/sas_cables_enclosures/
Good prices, haven't had any troubles. I'm pretty sure you could run them in some type of JBOD mode, which should enable quick swapping. I've always used them in RAID 5 or 6 mode, so I can't say for sure.

Can't help you with PC software. But I love CDFinder for Mac for cataloging all my drives' contents, including thumbnails of pictures and videos. I even requested a RED specific feature, and the author added it within 24 hours. I asked for a way to exclude creating multiple thumbnails for each of the RED reference movies. So he added the ability to disable thumbnails based on filenames. I have it exclude thumbnails for _f.mov, _h.mov & _m.mov

If you don't want to go 100% Mac, I'd still recommend setting up a cheap Mac based cataloging station. That way you can easily read any format drive (in case customers give you HFS formatted drives). Just find a cheap used Mac, add a SAS card, install NTFS-for-Mac (http://www.paragon-software.com/home/ntfs-mac/), buy a copy of CD-Finder (http://www.cdfinder.de/)and you are ready to rock.

Then, ideally, down the road add a LTO-4 drive, we found one on eBay for $1200. Tape is much safer for long term storage. If you don't refresh the bits on a hard drive every 18 months or so, you run a fairly high risk of data loss. LTO tapes are supposed to be good for 30 years.

 

[Corrado Silveri]

CDFinder!

http://www.cdfinder.de/

 

[Curran Giddens]

CDFinder!

http://www.cdfinder.de/

I use this program for cataloging optical discs.

 

[Fredrik Callinggard]

I use this program for cataloging optical discs.

That's cool but does it do what he asks for - deliver data on what the file content is on those discs - so you can quickly see what your looking for and then get the disc?

EDIT: Sorry checked it out - shouldn't have spoken before I did that. LOOKS BRILLIANT!

 

[Corrado Silveri]

I use this program for cataloging optical discs.

Works well also with hard drives

 

[MikeHedge]

Corrado!!!! yep it's the same thing as media indexer... both are only for mac.... looking for a PC solution.....


Mike

 

[BigLu]

Cheap solution i use that works for me.
I spread everything out on the screen in a folder mode.
And take a screen grab of the entire screen so i can generally see whats on that drive.
Then i name that screen grab by the hard drive name.
Its nothing high tech but i can find stuff.
and i have a master folder for only my HD screen grabs.

possibly a temp solution.

 

[MikeHedge]

@Luis. thanks!

so no one has a software for the PC that does the media indexing?

anyone?

 

[Lauri Kettunen]

Mike, I'm using Microsoft Expression Media. To speed up things I create Cineform express files for every disk and then can quickly view what's there within the HD.

 

[MikeHedge]

hey Lauri.... this does media indexing?

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Studio_OverView.aspx

 

[Paul Leeming]

Mike, try some of these, no doubt one will be the perfect tool for you:

http://www.nonags.com/nonags/diskcat.html

HTH

Paul

 

[Lauri Kettunen]

this does media indexing?

http://www.microsoft.com/expression/products/Studio_OverView.aspx

Not sure what you mean precisely. But it is possible to rate and label each clip. You can attach each image/clip with title, product, genre, intellectual genre, event, author, source etc and it is possible to add own fields as well. One can export contact sheets, XML files and so on.