HARD DRIVE for RED (advice)

[Will Keir]

Hey guys, thanks for taking the time to offer some advice.

What is a good company/hard drive to use with R1 footage?

I heard several years ago G-Tech made solid drives, I've had good success with LaCie drives in the past (SD footage) and I want to know what has been proven and is the most dependable drive to buy for R1 footage storage?

I'm looking at something external now, around 1tb-4tb.

Much appreciated!

Will Keir

 

[Ariel Weiss]

The Lacie works great for me.
With other brands i have problems with formatting to mac format, but maybe i'm doing something wrong.

 

[Curran Giddens]

I would go with either G-Tech or CalDigit.

 

[Wil Klassen]

I'll agree with Curran, G-Tech all the way.

 

[Brook Willard]

I would go with either G-Tech or CalDigit.

Yep.

 

[Brian Swanson]

Hard Drive Type

Hard Drive Type

If I am editing on FCP7 in ProRes 422 and they are shooting 4K, do I need a RAID5 or RAID0 setup to handle the required speed? Should it be an eSata connection? I know FCP will downconvert to 2K for editing, just curious if I need something special to handle 2K bandwidth. Thanks!

 

[Tom.Wong]

in my experience, the faster the better budget allowing. also depends on the number amount of disks you want in a raid. esata offers some great speeds, fibre offers more. but than again i've done cutting off a normal FW 800 single disk non raid maxtor drive at fcp log and transfer 2k half debayers just fine.

it's all about how much you wanna stack on in your timeline and how much render time you can take for a good framerate playback.

if your budget isn't really that big, i'd go with a nice esata g drive, tha'ts raid 0, and maybe get something from mercury pro as a raid 1 just to keep a redundant backup. still cheaper than building or buying a raid 5 drive which could end up being a thousand dollars. but you get decent speed and protection too. (dual disk raid 0 won't be as fast as let's say 5 disk raid 5 btw)

 

[Rick Allen]

These seem very good for the money http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/hard-drives/RAID/Desktop/
Barefeats did reviewed them http://barefeats.com/hard126.html

 

[Jason Samuel]

I've used these OWC Mercury Pro Qx2 4-Bay Drives... I would say they're the best value drives if you have a tight budget.. We had an issue with the first one we got and it was kind of a pain to get them to send out a replacement enclosure. They wanted us to send the enclosure and drives back to them, when we already had all of our footage on the drives. But we eventually got them to replace just the enclosure and the drive has been great ever since. It has quad interface (USB, FW800, FW400, eSata), so it's pretty well equipped. That was actually the main reason I chose this drive. I used eSata on the set to transfer footage and the editor only had FW800 on an iMac... So those that are budget conscious, this is a great drive. There are better drives, but they cost more. I try to choose the best drive that budget allows for and leave the decision up to the producer. But this drive does get my stamp of approval.

 

[John Howarth]

Glyph (www.glyphtech.com) & Avastor (www.avastor.com) are what we recommend to clients for on-set R3D data backups.

 

[Esmaeil Neisi]

the perfect 1 tb is F2 wich is a read with dual E-sata conectors good luck-

 

[Michael Romano]

Whatever you choose, back it up. I use the CalDigit HDPro RAID 5, and I still back it up. If you're cutting with camera proxies, they will run off a FW800 drive, pretty much any brand as well!