Best storage solution for wedding videographers

[Daniel James]

Raid 5 was / is a way of pooling discs into a single drive for redundancy, its was never designed for speed.

[Jeff Harper]

Luc, when a hard drive is nearly full it crawls, period, there is nothing to be done about it. If you're using 5400RPM drives and expecting speed, forget it, ain't happening and never will, I don't care what the specs say.

I agree with you Noa, I don't like SSD for edting. It's what I use now, I jumped on the band wagon and sold my 15K SAS drives and have pretty much regretted it, performance wise I've gained nothing. But I do love the quick boot times.

[Luc Spencer]

Jeff, the Red idles at 5400rpm and accelerates to 7200 when needed. It's called "IntelliPower". I looked at benchmarks for both the Red and the Black. The scores are ~800 and ~1000, respectively. So 2 Reds in a RAID0 will outperform a Black by a significant margin (I will benchmark them after formatting).

15k HDDs are not an option for me, I'm only seeing the WD VelociRaptor 10k. Since I have 3 Red drives already and need to spend money on lenses and other things, I need to make do with what I have. I will buy another HDD just for storing things I don't really need, which is why I mentioned the WD Green.

Since the Reds are made for RAID, I'm still very tempted to go for RAID0, even though it's a bit risky. Considering I'll have an external HDD with all my vital data backed up, it doesn't sound too bad.

My former RAID0 made up of 2 Samsung Spinpoints (which are NOT designed for RAID) held for about 2 years, after which I started getting warnings that one of them was faulty. I could still work for a few more months until it became unusable.

I plan to tell Premiere to store all its cache on the RAID0, so that increased write speed in RAID0 will be very welcome.

[Noa Put]

You definitely need a dedicated raid controller to gain the best performance and to have better reliability as well, they are not "that" expensive and should give a better performance instead of the onboard raid controller, eventhough raid 0 is not very safe as one failing drive will loose all data but I have been working with one drive only and if that one fails it's also gone. If you would get a separate raid controller for 2 drives in raid 0 and then have a usb 3 drive connected to backup the contents of those 2 drives in raid the max amount of work you might loose is one day if the raid would fail or less depending how often you apply a back up. If you get a backup software solution to first backup the entire drive which will take a long time but after that it can be configured to do incremental backups which run much faster as it only replaces what is changed and adds what had been added.

[Luc Spencer]

Noa, cheapest one I can find in Romania costs $150, the DELL PERC H200, and it says 6Gb/s SAS. I don't have SAS drives.

In addition, when you want to save up for a lens like the Voigtlander (you are very familiar with my obsession), every amount matters. Besides, I was getting somewhere around 200 MB/s write speeds with my former RAID0 setup on that older mobo, I'm now running a Z97 chipset which really shouldn't have a slower RAID controller.

I will copy the sequence file every day, I should be fine.

[Anthony McErlean]

Originally Posted by Luc Spencer

Last summer I upgraded my PC to an i7 4790k and 16GB of RAM (for those who don't know already, 16 gigs is NOT enough to work on a lengthy wedding in Premiere,

I would just like to know what you guys use to store a lot of wedding footage (I have filled my 4TB already), if you work directly from the storage HDDs (which I do), and if you think that getting a ~240GB SSD just for my currently active project would be a good idea.

For some reason, as I go past an hour or so in my timeline in Premiere, everything feels sluggish!

I have a 250GB Samsung SSD as my C Drive. All my programs are stored here.
I have 5 or 6 internal WD Black 1TB drives. One them is my Video drive, all my Edius projects are stored in this drive and the rest are used for backups, Data and the likes.
If my video drive gets full and don't want to delete any projects I just replace my Video drive with another Video Drive and work away.

I also have a hot swap bay in my PC were I can add/remove another HDD and use this drive for more external storage of any projects.

I could be wrong but don't think an SSD speeds up any projects on my Edius HD timeline in any way. I didn't buy it for that.
My processor (2700K 3.50GHz 16GB RAM) is by no means fast going by todays CPUs but I'm more than happy with my PC and workflow, and very little or no rendering at all, it has never let me down.

Never work from your storage drive, why would you do this?

[Jeff Harper]

Originally Posted by Luc Spencer

Jeff, the Red idles at 5400rpm and accelerates to 7200 when needed.

How's that working for you?

For storage alone, fine, but for editing? Not a good choice, IMO. I've had Intellipower drives, green drives, and the lot and they are are not good for anything but storage. Green drives are just the worst. It seems I've had about every type of drive and tried them in many configurations. I began using pricey Adaptec RAID controllers in the 90's, when good controllers cost $2K and more.

Velociraptors are cheap cheap cheap. You do not need RAID, but if you must, run two in a raid 0, the cost is so small.

All onboard raid controllers ARE

Just do your backups

[Jeff Harper]

Originally Posted by Luc Spencer

Jeff, the Red idles at 5400rpm and accelerates to 7200 when needed.

How's that working for you?

For storage alone, fine, but for editing? Not a good choice, IMO. I've had Intellipower drives, green drives, and the lot and they are are not good for anything but storage. Green drives are just the worst. It seems I've had about every type of drive and tried them in many configurations. I began using pricey Adaptec RAID controllers in the 90's, when good controllers cost $2K and more.

Velociraptors are cheap cheap cheap. Or you could edit just fine off of a WD Black, great drives, but not for RAID.

All onboard raid controllers ARE NOT THE SAME. THEY VARY GREATLY DEPENDING ON THE BOARD. Generally the people that know anything DO NOT use them. Sometimes they can be fine, but for pros that don't want to waste time on the nonsense they do it right and get separate controllers, or they know for a fact that the onboard controller is a good one and they know how to set it up.

Also, if your present drives are nearly full, you cannot complain about their speed, it's just what happens.

[Luc Spencer]

Originally Posted by Anthony McErlean

Never work from your storage drive, why would you do this?

Since the RAID array had 4TB when I created it, I thought I'd have enough space for both active and finished projects. It was never treated as just storage.

My brain feels very confused right now. I am tempted by the Black but I have 3 Reds and I want to make them work. I still believe I can achieve better performance with 2 of them in RAID0 than just working off a single Black. At the same time the thought that the Black has faster access times is annoying (timeline scrubbing?).

I'm almost ready to flip a coin at this point.

[Anthony McErlean]

Originally Posted by Luc Spencer

Since the RAID array had 4TB when I created it, I thought I'd have enough space for both active and finished projects. It was never treated as just storage.
.

I see, I keep the two apart. You never know what notion a PC will take and corrupt a drive on you.
Don't chance it.

[Luc Spencer]

Update: ordered a WD Green 3TB that's going to be used for storing finished work, pictures, stuff like that. I might get a rack for it and keep it outside my PC since I won't need to access it often.

When the HDD arrives I will copy all my video stuff on it (including active projects), then strip the RAID5 and turn it into RAID0. Will post the benchmark results afterwards, with the drives empty.

Thanks again to everyone who shared their thoughts on this matter. I am actually curious to see how 2 Reds perform together, in their natural habitat, if I may put it that way. I know they're already in RAID, but without a separate raid controller raid5 does more bad than good, apparently.

[Luc Spencer]

Just one last benchmark on the RAID5, after having freed up 300+ GB and disabling write-cache buffer flushing in windows. Will compare this to the RAID0 scores, hopefully tomorrow after my HDD arrives.

It's a clear boost in speed, but still horrid. Those of you with a Black drive, feel free to post your own scores in Crystal Disk Mark. I ran it at 1000MB and 2 passes. Just curious :)

[Nigel Barker]

I just bought a Seagate Archive HDD 8TB drive for archiving as it's about the lowest price per GB of any driver available now & the 8TB means that I have fewer disks to worry about. The design of these drives mean that they are optimised for short bursts of writes & reads not sustained write performance so they are not supposed to be suitable for regular use. So far I have been very pleased, I will be getting one each for the Mac Pros my wife & I own as the capacity will be fantastic for time Machine backups.

The drive cost me £185 ($288/€264) delivered from Amazon including VAT sales tax.

[Ralph Gereg]

Originally Posted by Nigel Barker

I just bought a Seagate Archive HDD 8TB drive for archiving as it's about the lowest price per GB of any driver available now & the 8TB means that I have fewer disks to worry about. The design of these drives mean that they are optimised for short bursts of writes & reads not sustained write performance so they are not supposed to be suitable for regular use. So far I have been very pleased, I will be getting one each for the Mac Pros my wife & I own as the capacity will be fantastic for time Machine backups.

The drive cost me £185 ($288/€264) delivered from Amazon including VAT sales tax.

That's very interesting Nigel... good find! :) I'd not even heard of Archive HDD's like this until now. I looked this up on Seagates website and looked at the specs data sheet. They show the drive is rated to run 24x7 or 8760 hours per year.

What I would like to understand better is how they calculate their MTBF (mean time between failure) numbers? They have MTBF for thie drive listed as 800,000 hours or in normal terms, approximately 91 Years! So obviously this is not real world actual perfomance data... so how do they figure it out?

And if these things really do last that long.. then why only a 3 year warranty? Why not a 50 year or Lifetime warranty? That of course is a rhetorical question... being a tech guy, I know better but if these drives are really that reliable, I'm seriously going to look into buying a few for my own data backups at well.

[Jeff Harper]

OMG, had not idea there are drives available in this size! I'm so out of it!

I saw today that a 10GB drive is going to be released, if it hasn't been already. Amazing.