Large Hard Drives

[Pete Cofrancesco]

I’m thinking of getting two 12tb internal drives so I can consolidate and archive all my video projects. So instead of getting into external raids I’d rather keep a duplicate on a second drive. I’d also like to occasionally use them for 4k multi camera projects. I edit primary on my 1tb ssd but when you transcode 4k into ProRes you quickly run out of space.

In the past I have been attracted to Seagate because of their price. I’ve only had a few drives fail over the years all of have been Seagate. I’ve read articles that recently Seagate has made a concerted effort to mend their reputation. Question being buying their more expensive NAS drives or for that matter any other manufacturers NAS would significantly reduce the risk of drive failure since they’re designed for commercial use.

I’ve also noticed most of thes drives are 7200 and the 5400 aren’t less expensive. I’m aware that the 7200 are faster but with a trade off of noise, heat, and energy efficiency. Although I’ve noticed my mac will put drives to sleep so I’m not sure how important the efficiency is.

Any recommendations?

[Edward Carlson]

7200 rpm decreases seek time, which is important for real-time video playback. I avoid Seagate like the plague. I have the same experience as you, the majority of dead drives I see are Seagate. I like Western Digital. G-technology is owned by Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. Western Digital owns HGST. The drives inside G-drives are WD drives, so that's what I go with.

12 TB drive platters are high density, so there might be an issue with reading large amounts of non-sequential data. A RAID of smaller drives might provide you with higher data rates, and you'll see an improvement with multicamera playback.

[Tony Neal]

As long as the big HDDs are mirrored it should be fine for archiving.
I use an external NAS with 8TB drives for archiving and have also used it for a 4K multicam edit, which works fine but the HDDs fall asleep during long edits and take a while to catch up if you are jumping around on the timeline.
Better to leave the big drives for archiving and use SSDs that are just big enough for one cameras worth of video.Also, 3 and 4 TB drives are still cheaper per GB than the big drives and

[Pete Cofrancesco]

Thanks for the replies

I know the 4tb are better price but that's situation I'm currently dealing with a bunch of small drives trying to keep track of what projects are where and whether they're backup.

Thanks for the confirm on Seagate it isn't just me. Maybe I should go WD purple, red, or gold.

[Jonathan Levin]

I've had nothing but pain and suffering with Seagate drives. You really shouldn't consider anything but 7200rpm drives for video.

Another bit of advice that I recently learned is that you want to look for drives that are called "enterprise" drives. From what I understand, these types of drives are better and more durable than standard "non-enterprise" HD.

I have a G-Raid 12TB Thunderbolt 3 Raid set up. Both those drives are enterprise. They cost a bit more, but if you've had the troubles in the past that I've had since the days of 'ol SCSI to now, enterprise seems to be a small price to pay.

One question, why do you want to put "all your eggs in one basket" on those drives. Maybe do a few 4 or 6 tb drives. Especially if you hardly use those archived projects.