media management for large projects

I've got almost 200 hours of footage to log/digitize for a documentary. I'm working in final cut 5.1.4 still and my footage is DV shot at 30p.

I need some advice regarding the following options I am considering for storing media:

1) Purchasing a firewire hub and using 500gig OWC drives to load in the material
(I'm not sure if this is a safe way to go) I've had drives fail in the past - though not the OWC.

2) I found someone who can build an array of disks (hard-disks like the ones used in the external drives, not cd or dvd). (this fellow uses Seagate drives) The data isn't mirrored but rather spread across all the drives in such a way that if one of the drives failed, there is a copy of the data that was on that drive, spread across the other drives. Its redundant enough so that if one of the drives failed, there would be an ample amount of time to replace it (and rebuild the array) before the remote chance of another drive failing.
The cost of this setup is much greater than option 1
A base setup for 1.5 terrabytes is $2000. The drives would be 750gigs
I need about 2 terrabytes total and the next price up is $2300 for 2250GB.

Is option number 2 uneccesary or a worthwhile investment?

Thanks for your time.

Option 2 is called a RAID 5 solution and the question you have to ask is, it it worth the money to pay for this drive setup now, or to have to spend a week or more RECAPTURING your footage (200 hours!) if you have a drive fail. And drives WILL fail, it is only a matter of when.

I myself find them well worth it.


www.shanerosseditor.com

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Option #2 you described is a RAID, and you can scratch build them like that or buy them ready to go (CalDigit and G-Tech comes to mind). There's a specific way to format the RAID so that the data has a redundant backup so that nothing is lost if a drive fails; there's lots of information on these boards if you do a search for it.

You can get a 2TB CalDigit RAID that runs via Fiewire for $1500 or a G-Tech G-Raid for $1300; I'm not sure what extra juju that guy is putting into his creations for the extra $$$. Whether it's a worthy investment or not is up to you, if you think you'll use it again in the future or just sell it off for a small loss once you're done with it. Question: is this your doc, or were you hired to cut it? Because this is something the Producer could purchase for the project.

If you wind up going with regular firwire drives then I wouldn't use a hub, just daisy chain them together. Sounds wonky to me though as you'll need at least four 500gb drives and you won't have the data protection of a RAID (even the best drives can fail, you never know). BTW 200 hours of DV footage is 2.48TB.

HTH,
JK

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SCQT! Self-contained QuickTime ? pass it on!

Mon dieu Mr. Ross, you beat me to the punch!

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SCQT! Self-contained QuickTime ? pass it on!

Go with the RAID. I would normally consider chaining more than three FireWire drives to be unsafe. The bigger the drive (any FireWire drive above 300GB is more likely to fail, get corrupted, or lose data, or all three), the more likely you'll have problems. And no matter what you do, no matter how low your budget, don't buy some cheap drives (Lacies, Western Digitals, Maxtors...) thinking you'll weasel through!

Don't forget that you'll also need to allow for a bare minimum of 10 per cent free space. Twenty per cent free space is much better on a project like this. And you'll also need space for render files, movie files, graphics etc. All in all, you'll probably need about 35-45 per cent more space than necessary to hold your footage. But take comfort in the fact that once you're done with the project, you can sell the storage devices, or just keep them for the next project, at which point you pay nothing except whatever you have to do to maintain the equipment.


www.derekmok.com

The FireWireVR can be daisy chained without performance loss, this is a MAJOR advantage over the G-RAID 2 which cannot be daisy chained without the performance dropping on the 1st & 2nd unit to 16MB/s. Isn't that alone worth the little extra money?

The G-Raids are great drives but only do Raid-0, so no fault tolerance. Raid-5 has the peace of mind you're talking about, and like Shane says, is welll worth the investment. But it's pricey, and for DV material you won't make much use of the speed you're also paying for.

I'd reccommend forgetting about RAIDS and just go with backups of your media. As John says, you'll need 2.5 TB. so buy yourself 5 of the G-DRIVE 500GB at $250 a pop and a hook them up with a PCI firewire card -not a hub. Then buy an external bare firewire hard disk enclosure, and 5 bare 500GB drives. You can get Seagate Raptor or simliar drives for about $120. Back up each G-Drive to one of the bare drives, and voila! You've got 5TB total, and can sleep easy for about $2,000.

Thank you to everyone who responded to my query.
I am the Prod./Dir on this documentary. It's been funded through numerous grants from the government and private foundations. So, the purchase is coming out of the latest grant award.

I have had problems daisy chaining drives in the past which is why I was contemplating a firewire hub. I have only been using G-Tech and OWC drives at 320 gigs max for short form projects. This is the first time I am tackling a long form project.

Thanks again for your responses!

Judy

Going a little OT here...this is for Jon @ CalDigit:

Hey Jon,

These drives look very appealing but after looking at them on the website, I have a question for you...

? What are the internal drive unit's manufacturers (please don't say Maxtor / WD)?

Thanks

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I believe they are Hitachis. Shane would know. He's got one.

Michael Horton
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Joe,

Michael is right, Hitachi Deskstar Enterprise class SATA II drives are all we use on everything now. Quite frankly nothing else has passed the muster of our engineering team. Nothing else has the same forensics or support (for video, it just doesn't get any better). We only use the best!

Jon

THAT is great news...makes me want 'em even more. Hitachi's are (IMHO also) the best for what we do. I need a hearty box with data protect for my mobile studio (probably going after the 2 TB FirewireVR - 2 streams of Uncompresed 10-Bit SD is perfect).

Thanks for staying with us & keeping us up to date on your products. We LOVE good Customer Support

Joey

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.