Storage Drive

Hoku Uchiyama · December 21, 2008

Hi Folks,

I'm currently prepping a documentary where we'll be shooting in a lot of unpredictable locations. We're shooting on the Sony XDCAM EX1.

Our producer has purchased several Seagate FreeAgent Desk (1TB) drives. The plan is to use these drives to store our footage during production.

Does anybody here have experience with those? Were they reliable? Did they do the job?

Thanks,

-Hoku

hoku@rosethemovie.com

Edited December 21, 2008 by Hoku Uchiyama

December 21, 2008

Hoku,

I've not used the 1TB drives but the 500GB drives work a treat. I'd always stick with Seagate or IBM because of the warranty. Let's put it this way, any hard drive company that offers 3 or 5 years warranty knows that it's hard drives are reliable. Sure, you can buy cheaper, but if you are working with purely digital rushes, reliability is the key thing.

On location, with a P2 system, I've been using 2.5" 250GB Segate SATA drives. They're the ones designed as laptop hard drives. The benefit with them is, if you put them in an external case, they are powered off the USB port so you don't need another power point, you can run off the laptop battery if you need to.

Adrian Sierkowski · December 21, 2008

I use dual Western Digital 160gb drives in the field to back things up for offloading my cards. Later on, if I'm here in the US, this will get re-backed up back at base camp to dual 500GB Lacie drives.

A doco I'm doing soon in Africa will have the same issue and I'm thinking the same work-flow for me. Dual 160gb western digitals in the field (about 10 hours each of footage) and then back up to a few hard drives at base camp. We had also talked about perhaps remote upload to a server-space from Africa, and might do that one day a week for safety, but only of selects and uploads will take time.

Consequently, anyone know of a field-download thingi for the XdCam? A card dump without the need of a laptop?

Christopher Santucci · December 21, 2008

I also have a few Western Digital 160 GB Passport drives that have been working great even though I have to use a USB hub with them because my older G4 Powerbook doesn't have high enough bus voltage.

I've been using the "Pro Edition" triple interface Western Digital Mybook drives which have been working great.

.

Alfeo Dixon · December 22, 2008

Personally I like the G-Tech drives. We used them on Somebodies (HPX2000) and Van Wilder III (RED) with no issues.

Hoku Uchiyama · December 23, 2008

Thanks all!

I appreciate the input.

-Hoku

Hoku Uchiyama · December 23, 2008

Hey Folks,

I've just learned that in addition to the Seagate FreeAgent Desk (1 TB) drives, the production has also, thus far, purchased Seagate FreeAgent Desktop (1 TB) drives.

If any of you have had any experiences with either of those drives, I'd love to hear about them. In particular I'd like to hear if they were reliable.

Thanks,

-Hoku

Adrian Sierkowski · December 23, 2008

For the most part a drive is a drive. Inside you'll have other bits, for example, my Lacie Porsche drive was just a Maxtor on the inside :/

Phil Rhodes · December 23, 2008

Let's put it this way, any hard drive company that offers 3 or 5 years warranty knows that it's hard drives are reliable.

Unfortunately, it isn't quite that simple. The warranty obviously only covers the drive; you can replace the drive, but the data is still gone. That being the case, all that predicates the length of the warranty is how many they've budgeted to replace.

You're just paying for their risk management, not really for better engineering. What you really want is data insurance, but that's very, very, very expensive.

P

Adrian Sierkowski · December 23, 2008

BACK UP ALL YOUR DATA!

Also see what kind of deal you can get for online storage-- something like webspace. Might take a long time to upload/download but such data-centers always keep their servers backed up so it's another safety net.