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Best hard drive for Data Wrangling


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Hi everybody,

 

what's in your opinion the best choice in terms of brand/model for an external hard drive for a Data Wrangler?

I used to go with Lacie Quadra and Rugged with firewire 800 when I was at film school, what do the professional Data Wranglers use?

 

Thanks,

 

Francesco.

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Hi

 

(sorry for my bad english)

 

As a professional (DIT area), I can comment on some aspects to consider.

 

- The shooting conditions (location), is a very important aspect. (External power problems) needs a different solution to work with your entire season in the comfort of a studio.

 

According to this, we must take into account every element necessary to do all the steps from the manipulation of material resources or support on which the camera is recording.

 

Although the quality of the discs, connections, cables to use is very important, it is also very important to the software which perform the "copy" of the data. For me, Drag and Drop or Copy Paste is not the best., Specialized programs for this work allows the verification of the origin and destination. Example for RED Cameras (http://www.r3ddata.com)

 

a UPS is vital.

 

From personal experience and applying a basic configuration and portable, the LaCie Hard Disk d2 series quaddra (LaCie Rugged for difficult conditions), as the G Technology G drive I have always worked well and smoothly.

Solid state drives are another option (speed and low consumption) but are expensive and low capacity. Again, make working conditions determine the selection of each component.

 

in real life, In documentary I had to manage the media during a flight.

 

Do not forget that for the whole process must have full redundancy and permanent copy of the DATA, as a minimum have 2 physical disks, independent and copy these units direct from the original chamber.

 

The support post production house for material that is delivered from the shoot, is another very important aspect, storage systems should be equally safe.

 

Store discs good condition and with original material to finish 100% project.

 

For the process of archiving of this material and additional (graphics, music, projects), also should be evaluated options such as LTO, and other options tolerancion always be aware of the fault.

 

I just want to help a little.

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  • Premium Member

Further to the above, often the procedure is more important than the hardware. Basically all half-decent flash devices, and absolutely all hard disk devices, use core technology ultimately made by just a few companies and the performance is not dependent on the name plate that eventually gets stuck on it. Reliability may be, and there is a fairly significant problem with counterfeit flash around, so use some degree of care.

 

I wrote an article on this (based, actually, on a post I made on this forum) about this.

 

http://philrhodes.com/write_wrangle.php

 

P

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  • 5 weeks later...
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While the manufacture list may be different often there are software differences and it DOES matter what chip you put with what hard drive. The import things to consider more than brand are reliability, redundancy, and speed. Power is a problem that we can usually solve (small generator, batteries, bus powered, etc) but more professional shows have some type of RAID 0+1 array plus a RAID 1 Drive for shuttling the data back and fourth to post. Always have two independent copies. Software that use to make the copy is very important because you want to have some type of checksum to verify the copy occurred properly. I've been insinuations where it hadn't because the person just did a finder copy, or a drive was bad, etc and they didn't do a proper checksum.

 

~Marque

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