Long-Term Storage of RED-One footage "other than hard drives" ??

[andrewhake]

Hitachi is handing over its HDD operations to Western Digital and transitioning all their storage development efforts over to solid state.

So WD has only purchased the HDD division? Glad to hear that as it sounds like Hitachi has some amazing things coming up the pipe in regards to Solid State storage.

 

[Adam Eden]

Hey Jeff did you ever work for Truevision or AVID as I remember you helping me 10 years ago with things.

 

[shashbugu]

I can't see how as a professional you would budget a project without archiving being a line item, both from a clients and producers perspective. Thats really irresponsible. wether purchase or rental, LTO archiving is a must. for just a few hundred dollars you can archive up to 100 TB of data. you can even back up unlimited data online using one of the numerous cloud service advertised on radio and cable for like 50 bucks a year

 

[Kevin Wild]

Not to sidetrack this thread, but I have an Quantum LTO4 unit I'm selling with 4 brand new tapes. PM me if someone is interested. Thx.

Kevin

 

[Johnny Friday]

I can't see how as a professional you would budget a project without archiving being a line item, both from a clients and producers perspective. Thats really irresponsible. wether purchase or rental, LTO archiving is a must. for just a few hundred dollars you can archive up to 100 TB of data.

Probably depends IF you are actually working for a client YOURSELF or if you are in fact archiving, long term storing, online storage with access etc.....So, not so simple as every project should require a line item archive. Just as not every project requires a line item safety diver in my shallow world or ? goes back to some initial questions...what's your budget, what do you want to do with it and real world other questions.

 

[shashbugu]

Probably depends IF you are actually working for a client YOURSELF or if you are in fact archiving, long term storing, online storage with access etc.....So, not so simple as every project should require a line item archive. Just as not every project requires a line item safety diver in my shallow world or ? goes back to some initial questions...what's your budget, what do you want to do with it and real world other questions.

You have a valid point there. I guess I forgot most people are just independent producers looking for a solution. I stand corrected.

 

[Christoffer Glans]

Off topic or not. I looked at the prices for LTO5 decks and they are through the roof. I know that LTO5 is considered a huge improvement over LTO4, but would it be a good buy to go with LTO4 for less then the cost of LTO5?

 

[Kevin Wild]

Christopher, we just upgraded to LTO-5 and it is considerably faster and obviously holds twice as much data per tape.

That said, LTO-4 is still great if you do overnight backups, anyways. I have a used LTO-4 unit for sale. PM me if interested.

Thx.

Kevin

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I'm not sure how you define "through the roof", but currently the HP 3000 desktop LTO-5 SAS unit is around $2633 from Provantage. That is only $211 more than the LTO-4 version from Provantage. I've seen the LTO-4 external SAS units a bit cheaper here and there, but yet to see them under $2K. You can get an internal unit cheaper as you're not buying the external enclosure with it and all that. Pick up an ATTO H6xx card if you're on a Mac. If your on Windows, there are a few other choices, but IMO ATTO is still tops for LTO connectivity. You'll need backup software -- a lot of us are using BRU PE (Mac based). It works well. I would consider BRU Server if you're going to do backups of lots of connected workstations or you will be connecting automated tape libraries instead of stand-alone drives.

LTO does have an up-front cost. Currently you're looking at about $3600 to get up and running with LTO-5 and BRU software (mac) and writing your first tape. $200 or so less if you go with an LTO-4 drive. LTO-4 media currently have the $/GB edge as you can buy them in bulk for cheap. I just bought two 20-packs of Fuji LTO-4 media off ebay and after shipping it came to $19.83 per tape. LTO-4 tapes hold 800GB. With the data integrity overhead in BRU, you get about 745GB on a tape, but sometimes more if compression can assist. When backing up most large media files, like R3D data or video like H264, or anything that's already compressed, the compression does nothing.

Quantum LTO drives are another option vs. HP. They can be finicky at times on the Mac, but still work. I've found them to be a bit slower than the HP models for some reason, even though they claim the same numbers in their specs. With most of the Quantum units, you have to use their supplied controller card rather than buying an ATTO or other controller. Hence the finicky part. But this can also work out in your favor in terms of the total price.

LTO-5 drives can read and write both LTO-4 and LTO-5 media and they can do read-only for older LTO media types. For LTO-4 drives, it's read and write on LTO-4 and LTO-3 media, read-only on older types.