Best storage solution for wedding videographers

Luc Spencer · July 24th, 2015, 11:36 AM

goodbye RAID5, hello RAID0! can't wait to edit off of these drives now!

Noa Put · July 24th, 2015, 01:50 PM

The price/performance/capacity ratio of a "old" harddisc cannot be beaten, you can get a 6TB disc for 300 euro while a 1T SSD will set you back 500 euro.

Put a few of these large HD in a raid and that will be all the speed you need to edit, a SSD will not give you any performance gains in that respect because the processor is always the bottleneck, it just is not fast enough to be limited by the HD speed.
SSD is only useful for your OS and programs to decrease startup time, I rather spend my money on lots of harddisc space and that has become very cheap these days.

Jeff Harper · July 24th, 2015, 03:07 PM

But why would you edit on a huge drive designed for storage? These are not designed for performance. It makes no sense. And you have no backup.

Ideally an editor should buy two of these for storage/archiving, the second drive being a copy of the first.

Then you buy a FAST drive for editing ONLY, not storage.

This is not rocket science folks.

How I do it:

1 fast drive for OS

2 large drives for storage and archiving, one drive is a copy of the other. This is where you put your video files when they come off of the camera and store them after your edit is done.

1 smaller, faster drive for editing only. While editing you always save your project in three places each time you save it. You save your work on your edit drive, and once on each storage drive.

At the end of your edit, you delete the edit drive, and leave the other copies on your storage drives. Then you move your next wedding or project onto the edit drive and begin again.

Luc Spencer · July 24th, 2015, 10:35 PM

To me a regular HDD that can do ~150 MB/s is not really a storage drive. And when you put 2 of those together in RAID0 you pretty much beat any other single 7200rpm HDD, at least when it comes to transfer speeds.

I do have a back-up on another, external WD Red for which I bought a USB3 rack. This setup feels pretty solid to me for now :)

Nate Haustein · July 25th, 2015, 07:39 AM

Here's what I do for FCPX on an iMac:

- SSD system drive

- project and media on 12TB eSATA 4-Bay OWC RAID5 (~250MB/s Read/Write)

- regular backup via Carbon Copy Cloner to a pair of cheap 5TB Toshiba drives running as a RAID0 (10TB total) via OSX software RAID. Taped them together for easy handling. Photo attached of this monstrosity ;)

- for more data intensive projects, I use a Thunderbolt RAID5 that reaches ~450MB/s, but for most stuff the cheaper eSATA and USB connections are more than fine.

Steve Montoto · August 11th, 2015, 06:26 AM

Well I know everyone is not condoning online cloud storage but we do use it at the studio for piece of mind.

It was a pain to get the initial Terabytes uploaded, but now it's a no brainier for security. However we do have a pretty fast 25mb upload speed. It takes 1 day to upload a 130gb wedding/event while also backing up to our local 32tb Drobo with dual disk redundancy.

If there is a problem they will expedite ship hard drives to replace the data instead of downloading.

Steve

Stefanos Lampridis · November 14th, 2015, 02:17 PM

Any thoughts on unRAID, FlexRAID and Window's Storage Spaces?

I try to consume as much as possible on this as the needs in storage space continuously increasing....

July 24th, 2015, 11:36 AM	#31
Luc Spencer Major Player Join Date: Feb 2012 Location: Romania Posts: 201	Re: Best storage solution for wedding videographers goodbye RAID5, hello RAID0! can't wait to edit off of these drives now! Attached Images

July 24th, 2015, 01:50 PM	#32
Noa Put Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2007 Location: Belgium Posts: 9,510	Re: Best storage solution for wedding videographers The price/performance/capacity ratio of a "old" harddisc cannot be beaten, you can get a 6TB disc for 300 euro while a 1T SSD will set you back 500 euro. Put a few of these large HD in a raid and that will be all the speed you need to edit, a SSD will not give you any performance gains in that respect because the processor is always the bottleneck, it just is not fast enough to be limited by the HD speed. SSD is only useful for your OS and programs to decrease startup time, I rather spend my money on lots of harddisc space and that has become very cheap these days.

July 24th, 2015, 03:07 PM	#33
Jeff Harper Inner Circle Join Date: Jun 2005 Location: Cincinnati, OH Posts: 8,425	Re: Best storage solution for wedding videographers But why would you edit on a huge drive designed for storage? These are not designed for performance. It makes no sense. And you have no backup. Ideally an editor should buy two of these for storage/archiving, the second drive being a copy of the first. Then you buy a FAST drive for editing ONLY, not storage. This is not rocket science folks. How I do it: 1 fast drive for OS 2 large drives for storage and archiving, one drive is a copy of the other. This is where you put your video files when they come off of the camera and store them after your edit is done. 1 smaller, faster drive for editing only. While editing you always save your project in three places each time you save it. You save your work on your edit drive, and once on each storage drive. At the end of your edit, you delete the edit drive, and leave the other copies on your storage drives. Then you move your next wedding or project onto the edit drive and begin again. __________________ "The horror of what I saw on the timeline cannot be described."

July 24th, 2015, 10:35 PM	#34
Luc Spencer Major Player Join Date: Feb 2012 Location: Romania Posts: 201	Re: Best storage solution for wedding videographers To me a regular HDD that can do ~150 MB/s is not really a storage drive. And when you put 2 of those together in RAID0 you pretty much beat any other single 7200rpm HDD, at least when it comes to transfer speeds. I do have a back-up on another, external WD Red for which I bought a USB3 rack. This setup feels pretty solid to me for now :)

July 25th, 2015, 07:39 AM	#35
Nate Haustein Trustee Join Date: May 2007 Location: Minneapolis, MN Posts: 1,313	Re: Best storage solution for wedding videographers Here's what I do for FCPX on an iMac: - SSD system drive - project and media on 12TB eSATA 4-Bay OWC RAID5 (~250MB/s Read/Write) - regular backup via Carbon Copy Cloner to a pair of cheap 5TB Toshiba drives running as a RAID0 (10TB total) via OSX software RAID. Taped them together for easy handling. Photo attached of this monstrosity ;) - for more data intensive projects, I use a Thunderbolt RAID5 that reaches ~450MB/s, but for most stuff the cheaper eSATA and USB connections are more than fine. Attached Thumbnails __________________ Nate Haustein PXW-FX9 / FCPX www.flightcreativemedia.com

August 11th, 2015, 06:26 AM	#36
Steve Montoto Major Player Join Date: Jun 2003 Location: USA Posts: 302	Re: Best storage solution for wedding videographers Well I know everyone is not condoning online cloud storage but we do use it at the studio for piece of mind. It was a pain to get the initial Terabytes uploaded, but now it's a no brainier for security. However we do have a pretty fast 25mb upload speed. It takes 1 day to upload a 130gb wedding/event while also backing up to our local 32tb Drobo with dual disk redundancy. If there is a problem they will expedite ship hard drives to replace the data instead of downloading. Steve

November 14th, 2015, 02:17 PM	#37
Stefanos Lampridis Regular Crew Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Piraeus Greece Posts: 28	Re: Best storage solution for wedding videographers Any thoughts on unRAID, FlexRAID and Window's Storage Spaces? I try to consume as much as possible on this as the needs in storage space continuously increasing....