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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 :)

Most reliable hard drives?

Zach Mckinley

Zach Mckinley

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Recently I've been running into issues with my solid state drives. I was wondering what drives everyone is using and what drives people rely on the most. I have a server that I backup to but it would be nice to not have to pull footage off when a drive is having issues!
 
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Hard drives implies spindles/spinning disks, in which case we are likely talking Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba most of the time. Most brands other than that have sold or consolidated.

I would say in our industry Western Digital and Seagate are more common than Toshiba.

One thing to note if purchasing external RAIDs and drives:
- G-Tech is now Sandisk Professional = Western Digital
- Lacie = Seagate

I wouldn't be able to accurately estimate how many drives I have, but I own drives from all of them in quantity and I have only experienced the occasional very rare drive failure. In which case if the drive is under warranty, it gets swapped out and I restore from another redundant backup or simply purchase a new drive.

If we are talking solid state, whole different conversation. I currently have around 300TB of solid state with me on my current shoot. All NVMe M.2 being used in several ways.
 
Phil Holland said:
Hard drives implies spindles/spinning disks, in which case we are likely talking Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba most of the time. Most brands other than that have sold or consolidated.

I would say in our industry Western Digital and Seagate are more common than Toshiba.

One thing to note if purchasing external RAIDs and drives:
- G-Tech is now Sandisk Professional = Western Digital
- Lacie = Seagate

I wouldn't be able to accurately estimate how many drives I have, but I own drives from all of them in quantity and I have only experienced the occasional very rare drive failure. In which case if the drive is under warranty, it gets swapped out and I restore from another redundant backup or simply purchase a new drive.

If we are talking solid state, whole different conversation. I currently have around 300TB of solid state with me on my current shoot. All NVMe M.2 being used in several ways.
Click to expand...

I should have specified more. I usually use hard drives as a generalization. I was just hoping to hear what people are using but I am more interested in solid state drives.
 
SSDs are a complicated topic. TLC and QLC is a major consideration in some circumstances. Write cache can have a huge impact in data offloads. I use drives from pretty much everybody. Sabrent, Wester Digital, Samsung, etc. I've also burned through SSDs, mostly Samsung, but I would say I'm a "hard use case" when it comes to read and writes in those cases.

OWC is really worth looking at if you don't mind SoftRaid.

I see lots of people dumping to Samsung external drives or Glyph. I make my own. I moved entirely over to Thunderbolt 4 a bit ago as that's the line to the now and future. That should also go for "just USB4" as well, but TB4 gets you everything you want really. USB-C Gen 2 and Gen 2x2 are enough to get work done on the offload side if you don't need blazing speeds and heat. You can work over all of these connections in modern times as well.

Sandisk Pro has new proprietary-ish SSDs that feature a dock. Pros and cons to that strategy.

Internal, most of my drives are 4TB except on my big NVMe Raids that use 4TB or 8TB, but that's probably not what you're after.

My general questions for people are:
- What are you looking for the drive to do?
- How portable do you want it?
- How much space do you need?
- How fast do you want to go?
- How many pennies are you looking to spend?
 
Western Digital Black or Gold for hard drives for RAID or big storage drives. WD Passports and MyBooks are okay for sit and stay backup or file transfers, currently using them as Photo, SFX, and VFX royalty free resource drives.

As for SSD's, I haven't strayed too far from Samsung, used to be all Intel until they got to be outpaced by Samsung and we had a drive failure or two with Intel. The Samsungs have been great so far and our latest computer has M.2 models as well as 2.5 drives. The only downside is the failure potential as, like our bad Intel drives experience, we know SSDs can just not work one day so the best strategy for us has been to break things up in several drives and arranged as OS, Programs, Project, Cache, Storage, etc. and mix with various SSD sizes and 3.5" regular hard drives as needed. This makes backups and drive wear much easier to handle as well as being more organized, even though there is the added expense.

Ultimately we want to get a big Storinator-like RAID for work instead of using various MyBook/Passports/External DIY WD Black drives for assets as well as another one just for big personal backup storage for everything we have so far. I'm not sure if we'll use WD Gold or Seagate Ironwolf Pros, the Ironwolfs are supposed to have some sort of extra feature for big RAID arrays like that but WD Gold could be more advanced by then. Although once 20TB drives start becoming cheaper we may be fine with just a few of those to be our big backup solution. I don't expect SSD drives to be hitting 20TB anytime soon enough to be affordable but then again there's supposed to be a big jump in SSD capacity sometime in the near future but the chip shortage situation may have delayed those advances.
 
Updating online storage to Micron 9400 Pro arrays as we speak. Large NAS + Ironwolf for backup. Cloud for offsite backup. OWC Thunderbolt Envoy Pro for on the go.
 
Karim D. Ghantous said:
It's almost like the storage needed for 8K footage is going to cost more than the camera!
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Depends on how much you shoot and how your workflow needs must be met.

There's plenty of people popping around with 16TB RAIDs and never having to pay for archive drives as that lands on some studio's shoulders.

But in reality, for production work and companies, archive drives and work volumes are budgeted even if you are just renting various storage solutions.
 
What's everyone using for archive/long term storage? Still LTO?

Figured solid state drives (regardless of type) just sitting on a shelf will last almost indefinitely. It won't seize like hard disk (mechanical/platter) drives do after sitting for a few years and its wear & tear is based on the amount of reads/writes. More expensive, but also more accessible.
 
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Mike P. said:
What's everyone using for archive/long term storage? Still LTO?

Figured solid state drives (regardless of type) just sitting on a shelf will last almost indefinitely. It won't seize like hard disk (mechanical/platter) drives do after sitting for a few years and it's wear & tear is based on the amount of reads/writes. More expensive, but also more accessible.
Click to expand...

Do not archive on SSD. They lose their charge and are subject to other weirdness. In terms of general use and failure, they do gain the benefit of being able to read often when the drives go bad. Long term, wrong thing.

LTO hasn't been suitable for my workflow for a long time. So it's archiving to redundant spinners with a regular schedule of checking drive health and consolidating backups to newer disks long term. It's been working for the last 20+ years. LTO has issues pertaining to generation, capacity, complexity, etc. As well as speed. It fits a lot of workflows, it just hasn't been great for larger data sets and projects.
 
Archival tier on Azure runs around $750 per PB per month depending on which region you want.
 
I use a combo of LTO and spinning drives with at least 2 of each located in separate locations.
No doubt that hard drives are the easiest to deal with but I've seen my share of drives not spin up or click after sitting.

I'm retrieving LTO archives from as long as 14-15 years ago and data has always been retrieved with mostly minimal issues.

I'm sure for a conscientious and extremely tech aware person like Phil who periodically checks and makes newer backups, drives can work well enough.

Most clients I have are not nearly that on top of things (I've known a few to actually physically lose track of their archives) and LTO can be decent for storing and forgetting as long as the environment is relatively clean and climate control.

I think a combo of both is perhaps the best approach that covers the bases of speed, storage size, and life.

At the end of the day backing up and archiving footage is about redundancy and that includes periodically archiving to newer media.
The key issue in archiving is perhaps more about the strategy employed than just the strengths of any one format.

I imagine Cloud backup will eventually be a compelling option but it is still a monthly expense just to keep it in the cloud, the data pipes to get large amounts of data (i.e R3D) is expensive and wildly variable at the moment, and I personally want to have relatively easy physical access to footage for added peace of mind and security.

PS- This morning I think I just had a 4TB WD MyPassport SSD drive go nutty on me.
Had a crash while consolidating a project and the drive is now locks up the system and is quite slow.

Brian Timmons
BRITIM/MEDIA
 
Sadly the SSDs I've used have often given me issues. For most of my work, the speeds are needed but I've spent most of my morning reformatting drives and transferring footage for projects. I guess the best answer is just to make sure you have backups and are checking that you are updating drives when needed.

Oh, the joys of working with data! Thanks for your input, everyone!
 
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