RED-One video RAW storage for Windows7 PC ???

[George D.]

As we will be purchasing our RED-One in March, I was wondering what you guys with Windows7 PCs use for external hard drives to store your RAW video on ?

After buying the camera, we certainly will not have enough money left to be buying one of those RAID arrays yet. Hopefully in the future.

For now, I'm thinking of several 1TB hard drives, each capable of storing approximately 6 hours of RAW footage.

If you would be kind enough to give me the names, model numbers, and source of what you use, I'd appreciate it.

Thanks.

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[Stacey Spears]

I have a couple of 16-way xtore enclosures. I paid $1600 for one and $2200 for the other. I bought them at different times. It is an older generation of this: http://www.xtore.com/ProductInfo.aspx?ref=XB-RM1-3163-SR-A

Spend money on good 1 TB drives. I went with Seagate 1 TB and 750 GB drives and they fail more than I would like. Look at some enterprise RAID drives from someone like Hitachi.

I am using an Adaptec 5085 SAS controller. It takes about a minute for the card to boot during post and you have to install their software, which requires an admin password, to use. I would like to look into the new ATTO 6 GBs card. I want something with a web interace, like 3Ware. I had a 3Ware card, which was unreliable at the time I had it. Drives would vanish until I rebooted.

I use RAID6 on my source drive and RAID5 on my destination drive. I also backup the footage to LTO4.

You may want to look into the RED Station 2.5". Then purchase a lot of 1 TB 2.5" drives to backup your footage. You can store the bare drives in plastic cases. In this case, I would consider backing up to at least 2 drives.

You might contact http://www.maxxdigital.com/ as well.

 

[Elsie N]

Being budget-minded as well, an e-SATA docking station that connects to an e-SATA port (or e-SATA installed card) on your PC will allow you to use any SATA hdd for storage. I have an e-SATA docking station as well as a USB 3.0 one (for when I need to check what's on a drive and the e-SATA dock is otherwise busy).

So far I've only found a SATA 3 Gbs version but I'm sure the 6 Gbs versions will be on the market before long. There are reasonably priced 6Gbs drives up to 3 TBs already on the market, so storage for the masses should not be a problem.

 

[Lauri Kettunen]

Here are links to some eSATA stations

http://www.drobo.com/products/drobo-s.php

http://www.promise.com/storage/raid...m=172&sub_m=sub_m_4&rsn1=3&rsn3=6&SmarStorDAS

http://www.lian-li.com/v2/en/produc...=331&cl_index=12&sc_index=42&ss_index=115&g=f

 

[Elsie N]

Lauri, good solutions but I got the idea the OP was looking for budget solutions. Here is a link to the one I use to offload to an hdd for storage. Surprisingly, I can leave footage on there and call it up directly to Redcine or Adobe Premiere and view it at low res playback. The one drawback is that after selecting the footage, the dock station has to "wake-up" sometimes because when not in use, it spins down.

That link is: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817707175

edit: To be clear, I duplicate the footage on an internal RAID 0 when editing. The above solution is best used for archiving footage. Maybe I misunderstood the OP as to intended usage.

 

[Elsie N]

Crimeny, after checking the link I left above, I found this one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153112

that is a dual cradle model. Looks like a better buy for a few bucks more. Read the reviews... many of the negative ones are due to pilot error. The positive ones are the most informative.

 

[Rob Ruffo]

You guys will laugh but many of our hard drives are simply GoFlex USB 3 drives connected via USB 3. Dirt cheap - so easy to have lots of redundancy - and fast enough to play 1/4 res in PPro without issue. We have not yet had a failure, but we only use a drive for one project, then back up to LTO and store on a shelf (we don't "recycle"). Again, they are so cheap that doing this is no problem, and LTO is getting cheaper too and more user friendly.

 

[George D.]

You guys will laugh but many of our hard drives are simply GoFlex USB 3 drives connected via USB 3. Dirt cheap - so easy to have lots of redundancy - and fast enough to play 1/4 res in PPro without issue. We have not yet had a failure, but we only use a drive for one project, then back up to LTO and store on a shelf (we don't "recycle"). Again, they are so cheap that doing this is no problem, and LTO is getting cheaper too and more user friendly.

Dear Rob,

I am NOT laughing. We are a VERY small production company, and if at all possible, we MUST conserve our money, and the purchase of a RED-One is going to set us back for years. So, if we can get by with inexpensive hard drives, that will please me no end.

Would you be kind enough to give me the exact name, model number, and source of purchase for your GoFlex Drives? I am not familiar with those.

Also, what is a LTO ? A more detailed description of that would also be appreciated.

*And, I have a question about storing "finished" projects in Adobe PPro: How can a completed project within CS5 be stored in an "external" hard drive if it originated in the PC, because every time I've tried it, the program cannot find the original scenes filed elsewhere.

Thanks for your help, and I look forward to hearing from you.

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