Hey guys, could really use some advice and suggestions for my project in works. I am working on a travel series (already decided on p2 and tapeless). It involves a heavy amount of traveling and exotic locations. I have decided on taking 4x2TB Lacie drives in raid 0 spec (4 separate hard drives in 2TB each).

-64gb = 1 hour of DVCPRO-HD 1080i 29.97 so we anticipate 192gb of footage a day
-shoot days are 12 days per location = roughly coming up to 1.92tb
-the 2 extra hard drives are there for backing up the originals
-a custom built Sager notebook with the latest proc/highest ram will be the intemediary for xfering the files and doing rough cuts in the field

This is my solution out in the field. We also have a workstation in our office which holds tb in raid form internally. Mobo has E-sata capability. I am wondering what a total hard drive solution will be for not only storing the 6 episodes we will shoot (raw footage) for the season.

Also, is my solution for the field a viable one? NLE is Adobe premiere cs3

I STRONGLY recommend you NOT using Raid 0 for storage. Never! If 1 disk fails all fail, you will loose everything. Raid 1 is much safer for storage particularly with 4 drives.

Sounds like it could. I'd agree to stay away from RAID 0. Since you're shooting tapeless, a dead drive would really put you on the back foot.

You might also look into the PC card e SATA controllers for external storage. Might be a way to speed disk access. Don't know if any of them support RAID functionality, but if they do you could invoke RAID Level 1, 1+0, 3 or 5 for an additional level of data protection. If not, you might want to investigate desktop eSATA RAIDs you could take with you.

Don't know how this might effect your footage quality since I don't work in your format, but an intermediate codec might yield smaller file sizes. Lots of people like Cineform. I don't, but you might have better luck than I.

hey guys, thanks for the responses so far:

The raid issue for out in the field is not a problem as I mentioned 4 separate 2 tb hard drives. 2 of the 2tb hard drives will be master, and the remainder 2 will be backups of the master, right in the field. I don't forsee an issue with this. I've been using raid 0 for quite a while and have never encountered any failure of any sort but I think the backup drives address that issue.

Our workstation supports eSATA, so I am on the lookout for a HUGE storage solution , any advice here?