My friend Jules Kobelin is going to Berkeley Digital Film Institute to learn everything about digital film creation. So far she is loving every minute of it!
She recently came to me because she is having issues around inexpensive yet stable media storage. Specifically, she is trying to solve two problems:
1) She needs to store lots and lots of data from her film shoots
2) She needs fast access to her data while editing
The Storage Box
The first issue is relatively straight forward – throw a bunch of cheap drives at it. My friend Art Simon recently hooked me up with this 2-bay Galaxy Metal Gear “Storage Box” for $55. It uses a USB 2 interface and is set up to easily toss two large drives in it for backup storage.
I suggest Jules use the drives for the original off-loading of media and the final backup of completed media. She can put two 1 terabyte drives in there and store 3-6 months work of work. She should mirror each drive to make sure that if one fails she still has all the data. Additionally, I want her to store one of her drives “off-site” with YVOD.
The Editing Box
The second issue involves a bit more thought and leads me to a RAID solution. Jules uses Final Cut Studio which can process as much data as you can shove at it. As such, I would like to get her a Firewire 800 box with two drives bays.
It should be noted that she is NOT going to use this box for backups. As such she only needs to stripe the drives for speed which means the box only requires RAID 0. This will cut down on the cost of the box considerably.
Note: I have looked at Drobo but am not sold on the whole BeyondRAID proprietary technology. Sure it makes life easier – until something bad happens. When their system goes down, Drobo is the only game in town to recover your data. Of all places you do not want a single point of failure it is with your data.
Additionally, she can be smart about what drives she uses for each project. She can get smaller drives which costs less when the project allows (ie: she can use two 300GB drives instead of two 1 terabyte drives when appropriate).
Her main focus for this second Galaxy Metal Gear “Editing Box” is on speed. This enclosure has all the requirements for a sweet price of $110!
Firewire 800
RAID 0
2 internal SATA 3.0Gb/s dive bays