PHU-120K Professional Hard Disk 120GB trustworthy?

[Kent Beeson]

Hi

A quickie - anyone ever use this...PHU-120K Professional Hard Disk Recording Unit
120GB Up to 8 Hours Record Time...

If so should I buy this nearly $1000 item instead of SXS 32GB cards? Is this hard drive reliable and high quality for use with the SONY EX1R?

Thanks

[Craig Seeman]

I'd wait to see the prices on the new less expensive SxS cards. I'd probably rather have 4 of those than recording to a portable hard drive hooked to an SxS slot. If you're going to hook things to the camera then I'd go for broke (describes walled situation) and get a NanoFlash.

Don't forget you can also shoot just as endlessly with SxS since you can change one while the other records.

If you're really on a budget, get 4 MxM adaptors with 4 32GB ATPPromax SDHC cards. That should be about $720 (and you can get the cards separately a bit cheaper).
MxM Express

[Alister Chapman]

What Craig said ;)

Plus: If you drop a hard drive on to a hard surface there is a fair chance that it will break with the loss of possibly 8 hours of material. Drop an SxS card, memory stick or SD card and you are unlikely to break it. Even if you do you would loose only the footage on that card. 8 hours on one single drive is too many eggs in one basket for me.

[Barry J. Anwender]

Originally Posted by Kent Beeson

Is this hard drive reliable and high quality for use with the SONY EX1R?

What is not being said on this matter is the transfer times involved to off-load video from the hard drive or the SDHC cards. Both of these mediums rely on USB 2.0 speeds which are far from stellar with this amount of data. SDHC cards are of course considerably slower that the hard drive. Off-loading video from the stock SXS cards will be more efficient but at a steep cost.

However, you have another option by considering a Solid State Drive (SSD) with USB & eSATA-2 interfaces. The USB interface works with the EX camera exactly the same way it does for Sony's hard drive unit or the SDHC cards. Then the bonus is off-loading video from the SSD using the eSATA-2 interface. 8 hours of video will off-load in roughly 25 minutes. Sony's stock SXS cards cannot come close to this transfer time. You can do the math for the SDHC cards--they are painfully slow. By the way, a 128GB SSD with battery power and the interface card for the camera is under half the price of stock Sony hard drive unit or the equivalent number of SXS cards. Food for thought, when reliable performance and time are money in this business. Cheers!

[Alister Chapman]

Originally Posted by Barry J. Anwender

8 hours of video will off-load in roughly 25 minutes. Sony's stock SXS cards cannot come close to this transfer time........ ........Food for thought, when reliable performance and time are money in this business. Cheers!

SxS cards run at pretty much the same speed. I can offload a full 16Gb (52mins) SxS card in 3 1/2 minutes using a NextoDi 2500 or Sony PXU-MS240, so not that different at all.

As for reliability, time will tell. Having to use external cables and batteries is certainly not going to help make SSD's more reliable and the SSD's don't have internal power storage to prevent FAT corruption during power loss or disconnection as SxS cards do.

[Kent Beeson]

I appreciate all replies - without this advice I'd have bought the hard drive from SONY - but potentially hours lost on one drive, I think you're right...but man, who wants to pay $850 bucks for a little SxS 32GB card! Can't believe these prices...haven't they recouped on their R&D yet, bring down those prices more than they have please!

not too comfortable using the cheaper card alternatives, as I want the option at all times to record slow/quick mode and if I'm correct , only the SxS cards currently allow that, not even the 120k Hard drive will do that - yet...

So if I do go broke and get a NanoFlash, does that simply plug in to the EX1R or do the 2 SxS cards plug into it? Will Nano Flash therefore be able to record slo/quick mode as well?
KB

[Barry J. Anwender]

Originally Posted by Alister Chapman

SxS cards run at pretty much the same speed. I can offload a full 16Gb (52mins) SxS card in 3 1/2 minutes using a NextoDi 2500 or Sony PXU-MS240, so not that different at all.

From Sony's web page: Sony Product Detail Page - PXUMS240

"Record Time Per HDD Cartridge –HQ Mode: More than 13 hours / SQ Mode: More than 17 hours One-Touch Copy to HDD Cartridge –COPY ONLY: ~600Mbps (10min for 32GB card or approx. 10x real time) –COPY & VERIFY: ~300Mbps (20 min for 32GB card or approx. 5x real time) High-Speed SxS Read Transfer Function　 –e-SATA Interface to connect with PC (Max. 800Mbps read transfer speed) –Estimated Single Cartridge Ingest Time is less than 1 Hour (up to 17 hours per cartridge @ 35Mbps) Internal shock absorbers. The cartridge has an internal HDD which is suspended inside the PXU-HC240 chassis by four specially engineered dampers that help protect against shock. 3G shock detection. As in a laptop PC, this system senses a potential shock and temporarily “parks” the read/write heads away from the hard disk surface, to help protect the disk from damage."

Another point not being mentioned, here is having to fiddle around with a bag full of SXS or SDHC cards.

[Alister Chapman]

OK, you win on the MS240, but the NVS2500 is 3 1/2 mins for a full 16Gb card, which equates to 28 mins for 128Gb, so as I said there is little speed difference between SxS and your claimed 25 mins for a 128Gb SSD.

Id rather fiddle around with 4 SxS cards than an external SSD, battery pack, some kind of mount and all it's cables.

Don't forget Sony's new SxS-1 cards are half the price of the old cards. Also if you go the Memory Stick route via the Sony adapter or the SD card route there is nothing to stop you offloading several cards at once via multiple adapters to get faster transfers of longer projects.

The NanoFlash records on to compact flash cards and not SxS cards. It can record from any SDi source and a future firmware update will allow some overcrank speeds to be used. The big advantage of the NanoFlash is that you can record at higher bit rates for better picture quality.