Hello Everyone.

I am looking to buy a pair of hard drives for an upcoming project where I plan on recording an entire 7 hour long concert with two XF-100's plus some random clips with a 3rd XF-100. The settings I plan on using are: 1080p, 50 Mbps CBR and 60p . All cameras will be using SanDisk 128GB & 64GB cards.

Anyone have any suggestions for a hard drive size? I was thinking of getting a pair of 3TB Seagate External drives


A bit of a disclaimer I've never worked with the Xf-100's before


Thanks
John Cardo

In general, for hard drive get the fastest, largest you can afford. A pair of 3 GB drives should be ok. But have at least 3x more available video storage space than the raw video you intend to copy to the PC.

Consider a Raid1 configuration, especially if you plan to layer multiple streams on the timeline.

External drives (e.g., USB), while OK for backup and archive, can be slow for video editing, read the spec carefully. High quality drive are not cheap.

The real questions is how many drives should I buy. Lol.

Plot the size vs. cost on a chart.
You will see a point where the next size up is a lot more money.
Buy the drive that is at that sweet-spot.
Example: Seagate Backup Drive in Terabytes
2: $99
3: $104
4: $139
5: $159
6: $249

So there is a big-jump in price from 5TB to 6 TB
All things being equal, the 5TB is a good price followed by the 3 TB

Hi John..............

Done a lot of investigation on this subject over the years and can pretty well state the following as gospel:

1. Always use the fastest drive interface possible, Sata 3 (600Gb/s) at this point in time.

2. Always, ALWAYS use a Raid 10 array, never just a 0 or 1 (finding bods as can actually configure such arrays with individual drives over 2Tb can be problematic, as can the software modules involved, many are pretty flaky)

3. If using Sata 3 there is no point using drives of less than 7200 rpm and 3Tb, in fact the Hitachi spin off that now markets Hitachi drives DOES NOT even have a Sata 3 interface on their 2Tb or smaller drives.

4. Give Seagate drives the flick, they're statistically the most unreliable on the market (server farms know this stuff) use the drives manufactured by what used to be Hitachi, they're statistically the most reliable, in a Raid 10 of 4 X 3+ Tb drives - you can extrapolate these figures to the moon at will, drive controller allowing.

Note: Most Intel MoBo disc contollers only allow 4 hard drives in any one Raid array although they will allow another two drives not as part of that array. You may need to use a plug in hard drive controller if you wish to exceed this 4 drive figure, alternatively use larger drives, the greater the data density the faster they shift data. Thus a 6Tb drive can stream data to the absolute limit of the Sata 3 bandwidth, smaller drives struggle, which is why Hitachi (as was) offers no Sata 3 on its 2TB and smaller drives, they simply cannot use it.

The Hitachi's (as was) are more expensive, natch, but worth every penny. I've just recently rebuilt my monster PC which was based on Hitachi drives, nearly 10 years to the day from when it was built, lost my first drive last November, another 4 months later - all were raided 10 so no crisis, but heck those things just kept on trucking!


CS

Your storage requirement:

At 50 Mbps, each camera will be generating ~26 GB/hour of media.
Worst Case Total storage = 3 cameras X 26 GB/hour X 7 hours = 546 GB

You could get an SSD capable of holding that and be good to go for your edit.

Hello Everyone, My apologies for the delay in replying to this Thread.


@ Chris: I seem to have failed to mention that It will be external hard drives I will be purchasing however I do thank you for your advice and I will look into other brands such as Western Digital or HGST.

Of course budget is an issue otherwise I would just get a pair of G-Technology G-Drives

@Bill: Just to clarify, One hour of footage would result in a 26 GB file? Have i understood that correctly?




Thanks for all of your replies and help
John Cardo

A pair of 3 GB drives should be ok.

I mean 3 TB

How do you plan to connect the external drives to the PC?

It would be a Laptop and most likely USB 3.0 is the connection I'll be going with

If you can afford it, I really recommend that you buy enough cf cards so that you don't have to download and erase,then reuse the cards. 2 128GB cards per camera should do it for your 7-hour show. If you want backup, copy to a 1TB USB3 disk after the first card is full, but reformatting during a live show is just begging for operator error.

@Bill: Just to clarify, One hour of footage would result in a 26 GB file? Have i understood that correctly?
John Cardo

Yes I know this is an old thread.

The actual calculation is:

( 50 Mbps / 8 ) = 6.25 MB / sec.
6.25 MB / sec. x 3600 seconds / hour = 22.5 GB / hour, so my off the cuff estimation was a little high.
I prefer to be a little high than come up short.

22.5 GB hour x 7 hours x 3 cameras = 472.5 GB

So a ~500 - 512 GB SSD should do it. If you like to have margin for error though, I would consider a 750 GB or 1000 GB class SSD. That would also give you breathing room for future projects.