Best Terabyte Harddrive--on a Budget?

What are your recommendations for a good one under $200 for editing with FCP?

Thanks!

Nicolle

Internal? External enclosure?

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

If you're talking about an external drive with the casing, I won't recommend anything that price range.



www.strypesinpost.com

External drive. I'm a grad student and $200 is about the best I can do. Several years ago, someone here recommended a G-Tech (500 GB) and it's been great.

N

nlittrell

You can try B&H photo. They have a 1T Western Digital External-USB 2.0 & Firewire 800
HFS+ formatted for $139.00. Or a 2T External Western Digital USB 2.0 + Firewire 400 & 800 + eSATA + it's HFS+ formatted for $192.00

Just thought you might want to know

Russ Andris

A reliable EXTERNAL for $200? Nope.

Grad Student or not...your data is priceless. Scrape / borrow / steal & save more money and get a proper external or you will regret pinching the pennies later when your drive dies with all your work on it.

Believe me. It has happened to ALL OF US. I only let it happen to me ONCE...never again. My work is too important to me.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

> You can try B&H photo. They have a 1T Western Digital External-USB 2.0 & Firewire 800
> HFS+ formatted for $139.00. Or a 2T External Western Digital USB 2.0 + Firewire 400 & 800 + > eSATA + it's HFS+ formatted for $192.00

I gotta disagree with that recommendation completely. From what I've seen, heard and used, Western Digital external drives are really bad. I've used about a dozen -- never bought by me -- and I've trusted a grand total of none of them.


www.derekmok.com

G-Tech seems to get recommend a lot and they have an 1TB external for $189. It has FW800, eSATA, and USB 2.0.

PowerMax is selling a 1TB CalDigit drive (also a commonly recommended brand) for $208. This drive has USB 2.0, USB 3.0 and FW800. Currently no Macs have USB 3.0, but it's got a max speed faster than current eSATA drives so hopefully Mac support will come sooner rather than later.

While not as popular in the video world, Other World Computing (OWC) has some consistently well reviewed external drives as well. A 1TB for $169 gets you eSATA, FW800 and USB2.0.


-Andrew

Single drives are OK to TRANSPORT DATA...but to WORK FROM THEM with no redundancy is a dangerous recommendation. The OP wants to edit in FCP. If you lose a single work drive - you lose everything. I recommend a multi-drive RAID with protection like the CalDigit VR (which I use @ RAID "1" Mirroring). If one drive goes down, you replace it and the RAID rebuilds itself.

Worth every extra penny you spend in my experience

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

I'm working under the assumption, dangerous I know, that the OP properly backs-up his data. In that case, a single drive solution is fine, IMO. RAID 1 offers redundancy but it doesn't offer a back-up solution. RAID 1, compared to a single drive, doesn't help one out anymore when it comes to accidentally deleted files, corrupted directories and/or an electronics damaging power surge.

If one has more time than money working off a single drive while having a back-up to go back to is an acceptable way to go, IMO. I've been toiling away on a labor of love for a long time on un-RAIDed internal drives on my Mac Pro, but I also have a complete set of back-up HDDs at the producer's house, all the master tapes at the director's house and a set of tape dubs at my house.


-Andrew

We're talking about having a RAID 1, and a good enclosure for editing, not about brand fetish. All of the drives mentioned are solitary drives and they all make good transport drives. None of them have a built in fan. The metallic external casing helps as a heat sink, but you still don't have fans, so you shouldn't be running on them for long periods, which are what editing drives are built for. A decent RAID 1 enclosure will cost you in the region of $200 and up, a single 1TB drive will cost you from $60, and you need 2 drives to run a RAID 1.


>G-Tech seems to get recommend a lot

Yea, more like this one, but I heard G-Tech's rep has fallen over the years:
[g-technology.com]

Caldigit's reliable lower cost option, and the one we usually mention, is the Caldigit VR:
[www.CalDigit.com]



www.strypesinpost.com

Andrew,

I don't assume what the OP means. Assumptions are guesses. I ask and get clarification. We are not talking about backup...the OP simply wants a single external drive to edit on (which is in the post). For all we know, she's not even thinking about backing up because she's looking for a single unit solution (again DANGEROUS). You are talking about Religiously backing up - that does not help you if your single work drive fails. You lose everything after your last back-up. That is not worth it IMHO...but we all have our own ways of working and I am glad yours works for you. I personally would not hire someone on my dime to do a project that was not working on protected RAIDs. My Studio's time is money and better safe than sorry. Glad you have not had any trouble with your project. You have been lucky IMHO. Do you back up multiple times throughout your day? Most people do not. They do it once at the end of the day or once a week or once a month. What if you start at 9:00 AM and your drive fails at 5:00 PM? I am not willing to risk losing 9 hours work.

Nicolle,

My recommendation (I am using one of these right now): CalDigit VR 2 TB RAID "1" (2TB RAID for $395)

[www.bhphotovideo.com]

I don't recommend G-technology anymore since mine failed a few years ago and I stopped purchasing them. THE FAN IS THE THING!! Heat is DEATH to a hard drive.

When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

> You are talking about Religiously backing up - that does not help you if your single work drive
> fails. You lose everything after your last back-up. That is not worth it IMHO...Do you back up
> multiple times throughout your day? Most people do not.

Different jobs will engender different habits.

An editor who is working on the same batch of media for three months straight really doesn't have a reason to backup the media multiple times a day. This would be my situation. I backup my project file multiple times a day, so I don't need a RAID. I work off "JBOD" drives with backups any time new media comes in. On commercials, where turnarounds are fast, I work off the RAID5s on site. But those are also a case where once the media comes in, it doesn't change too often except for exported movie files (easily re-created when you have the project file and the clips) and logos and graphics (easily backed up in a matter of seconds).

grafixjoe does a lot of effects work, so he's constantly creating new media files that aren't batch-listed, and may take hours to re-render and re-create. And backing up all that media several times a day would be insane, especially since those effects could undergo multiple versions a day. He is also working for a huge company, so buying better equipment will probably cost less money than losing an hour and holding up clients, other departments, and so on.

Nicolle, you've heard the sides, you're the only one who can make the decision. Even if you go with a RAIDed setup with redundancy, you'd want a backup somewhere that's not hooked up to the system, as Andrew pointed out. If you're really uncertain about what you want, have an experienced editor/troubleshooter sit with you and go through your entire post process with him/her. That's really the only way to figure out what works for you. Just know that if you go with a single external drive, you're not really talking about $200 for one; you should be budgeting for $400 for two. Backup, backup.


www.derekmok.com

As Derek said, horses for courses.

Joe, the labor of love I mentioned is a documentary I've been working on the past 4yrs or so in my spare time. My FCP auto save vault points to a different drive than the drive my active FCP project saves to and the nightly back-up of my FCP project goes to yet another drive. Would batch digitizing around 150hrs of footage suck? Yes it would which is why I have a another set of HDDs w/all the footage. I have been lucky w/my documentary but I have also been prepared. I've had failures, clips go corrupt etc. and when that's happened I've whipped out Disc Warrior and/or gone to my back-ups. For a personal project like this I don't have the budget to mirror 3-4TBs of footage along with keeping separate HDD back-ups as well and, no, I don't trust RAID 1 enough to run it w/o a back-up solution in place. I got bit *hard* once by a corrupt file and being on a RAID 1 setup didn't help in a situation like that. That's pretty much when the distinction between redundancy and back-up became crystal clear in my mind.

At my current day job we run off a 60TB xSan w/all the usual redundancies in place. We also use our 'old' 26TB xSan for near-line storage and archive finished projects to mirrored HDDs which are checked every 2-3 months for data integrity. The HDDs are also from multiple manufacturers to decrease the chance of bad batch of HDDs biting us in the butt (came in handy during the Seagate fiasco not that long ago). I'd prefer DLT, but it's not my call. A freak accident crashed our near-line xSan not to long ago and it took sending log files directly to Apple for them to root though to get it back up again. All this took a few days so thankfully it wasn't our main xSan that went down otherwise we'd have 14 editors twiddling their thumbs for the better part of a week and a ton of direct-to-disk capture lost. I wish we had the budget to build up our 26TB xSan to 60TB so we could mirror our xSans but like they say, if wishes were horses beggars would ride.

And Joe, if you hired me on your dime I'm sure you'd pay a fair enough wage that a RAID 1 would be well w/the budget. Heck, I might even splurge for a RAID 5 box to go w/my external back-ups!


-Andrew

>I backup my project file multiple times a day, so I don't need a RAID.

I have to disagree on this. Just because you back up regularly, doesn't mean you don't need a RAID, and just because you have a RAID, doesn't mean you don't need to back up regularly. You buy better engineered drives and enclosures because they help minimize the risk of losing data. With better engineered drives, they perform better on the whole (enterprise level drives have a lower URE count compared to consumer grade drives, and drives with a bigger cache performs better than one with a smaller cache, same goes for spin speed). For the enclosure, it's the overall design (not looks, but function of the parts), as well as better internal components. Even then, batch issues and manufacturing defects do happen. Some companies have better QC and engineers on board and they do less outsourcing which results in better quality control, so to a certain degree, you do get what you are paying for, but faulty batches still happen sometimes.

Those particular drives mentioned earlier, even if they are manufactured to the highest of engineering standards, they do have critical design flaws if you intend to use them for editing. As Joey mentioned, those drives are transport drives, not editing drives. And I totally agree on that. Firstly, there is no redundancy on it, so there is no safeguard against data loss. How often does it happen? As much as 4 failures in about 6 months, on top of having corrupt clips. Happened to me on a show, and they were more drives returned than bought. Or you could be using the same drive for 5 years without issues. Happens to me too. Hard drives tend to fail in a "U" shaped kind of curve, where a higher number of drives fail in the first and 5th year onwards, less in the 2nd to 4th. The early part is known as early drive failures. And towards the 4th and 5th year, that's when drives reach the end of their lifespan, so you buy new ones, and use the older ones as door stoppers.

The hard drives mentioned earlier have a sturdy construction and are portable so you can carry them around with you easily, but although the metal parts may act as a heat sink, it still insufficient for use as editing drives. For editing drives, you need fans, and good internal circulation and convection currents so the air can cool the drives properly. The "Pro" Mac series are all designed to be air cooled, on top of having a giant aluminium casing that acts as a giant heat sink. Internally, the fans are well positioned to allow for good circulation of air. Design is important.

The last few shows I worked on that was shot on P2, we didn't have an LTO deck. But we had 2 copies of the P2 rushes on external drives, and everything that was shot was transferred as quicktime files for editing onto a RAID 5. Essentially, there was a total of 3 copies, with one copy on a redundant storage. We did occasional checks on the the P2 volumes, and sometimes a few clips on the P2 backups would have gone corrupt. The corruption was more common on the external drives than on the RAID, where no files went corrupt. Yes, having a power conditioner or a UPS also helps preserve the integrity of your data. Over a period of about a year and half, I had around 3 dead drives on the RAID (they were mostly older drives from the older RAID), and 5 dead external drives. Stuff like that happens, but no data was lost. If there was less redundancy, you may have one dead drive, and a corrupt clip on the other drive and that's your only copy left. Would I go with anything less? No. Definitely not for a long show. For my own set up, it's a RAID 1 with an external back up, but I mostly cut at houses, rather than on my own gear.

I know of production houses and people who do not think redundancy is important and they operate on solitary drives without back ups. But the time will come when you lose that all important client data, believe me, so if you do intend to take a Hail Mary pass on your data, don't say we didn't warn you. Of course, if you can lose your data without batting an eyelid, you're cool with anything, and due to the economic scarcity of money, I would go the cheapest route then.



www.strypesinpost.com

Wow--this has generated QUITE a discussion. Thanks for the input from all--very valuable. I am still kind of a newbie to all of this, so though a lot of what you have to say is useful, it is also somewhat out of my league! I'm a grad student and self-producer (I conceive, shoot, produce and edit myself) working on my labor of love, which is my Master's Projectmaster's project, with no budget and limited technology.

But you've raised important points. I haven't been backing up the way I should and if nothing else, this discussion is reinforcing the importance of this. I need more education about the raid technology--how it works. I like Derek's idea of finding an experienced editor to talk work-flow process, but living in Maine, I don't have easy access to wizards like you guys. Any recommendations?

Since everybody here has offered their opinions ? valid ones, all ? I'll chime in with mine.

When it comes to data protection, there are two things to consider: the chance of permanently losing data, and the inconvenience of temporarily losing access to data.

Say you're a commercial editor working in 1996 and your footage was provided to you on a stack of Digibeta tapes. Do you technically have to back up your media? No, of course not. If you lose a volume, you can simply batch-digitize the lost footage back in. You need to back up your project files, and any other files that didn't originate on tape, but the media files themselves are expendable.

Unless you're working on a hard deadline, and dealing with hours and hours of footage. In that case, losing a drive could be just as catastrophic as losing the whole job, because you simply don't have the time to re-batch everything. If you miss your deadline, your clients will hate you, you won't get jobs from them in the future, your children will go hungry and your wife will develop an ominous cough that she tries to cover up with a smile and good humor but in those quiet moments when she thinks you're not looking you can see the quiet dread in her eyes.

Point is, sometimes merely having a backup isn't enough. Sometimes it has to be a readily available backup, otherwise it's no better than having no backup at all.

The obvious catch, though, is that data-resiliency needs vary from editor to editor and job to job. The only way to know for sure what your own needs are is to engage in a series of what-if exercises. Point to your media drive, right now. Poof. It just died. Now what? Can you re-transfer the media from cards or tapes? Did you lose your project files entirely, or would you just have to roll back to an earlier version? Would you waste an hour or a day or a week recovering to the point where you can make forward progress again? Or would the job be so thoroughly @#$%& that you can't recover at all?

Get into the habit of thinking in terms of if-this-then-that. Make contingency plans. You could take simplistic advice and go out and buy a RAID from a company with a good reputation, and that would protect you against the failure of a single hard drive, yes ? but what if the RAID controller itself fails? Yes, you can obviously get it replaced, but what will you do for the days in between? Just take a vacation? Or do you need a better contingency plan. Heck, what if the power supply in your Mac dies? Do you know what you'd do then?

It's not necessary to go all-out making preparations for every possible contingency. Hardly anybody keeps a spare Mac Pro around just in case their primary system fails. Though my current client is doing exactly that for their asset-management system. They have a spare Xserve sitting in the rack, unpowered, just in case something fails inside the one running their database. If that happens, they'll move the drives to the spare server, power it up and be back in business within minutes. But that's because their asset-management application is important to them; if it's unavailable, the whole facility might as well go on vacation until it's back up and running. See? Contingency plans. What-if scenarios.

It's entirely fine to buy cheap hard drives, as long as you know exactly what you're gonna do if and when one of them fails. (In point of fact, you need to know what you're gonna do if and when an expensive hard drive fails, too. The fact that it's generally less likely doesn't mean it's never going to happen. To the contrary; when you buy high-quality stuff it's easier to get suckered into thinking you're safe, which makes it all the more devastating when something does go wrong.)

Bottom line: Stuff breaks. Stuff breaks all the damn time. Be prepared for it.

> Just because you back up regularly, doesn't mean you don't need a RAID, and just because
> you have a RAID, doesn't mean you don't need to back up regularly.

I'll grant that premise. But, it's also true that caution can turn into paranoia. Even if you have a work drive with redundancy, plus two backups, all three can fail at the same time. It's a lot less likely, but it can happen.

Whenever I work with tapeless media, I do have two backups of both the original raw media and the converted clips. Could all three drives die at the same time? Yes. Just not that likely, and if you were going to be that paranoid, even five backups could die at the same time. A RAID5 plus two backups could all die at the same time. You simply can't be that paranoid.

And, when I generalized that I didn't need a RAID, there's one factor missing: Sometimes you flat-out need a RAID setup for speed (that's why I use a RAID5 for commercials; you have no choice when you're working with Uncompressed HD and RED media, etc.).

Here are two more tips for Nicolle:

1. One of the most common faulty logics I've seen in here are people who say, "I've been using this drive/setup for years and it's never failed." Well, you can drive your car for a decade and it might only fail for the first time in its 10th year!

Don't assume something will continue to work just because it's worked before.

2. Backups can fail. Which also means that backups are worthless unless they're checked and updated regularly. If you direct, shoot and produce your own material, chances are your projects will also be active for a while.

Do not backup your media at the beginning and then put the drive on a shelf for six months. Six months is a long time, and drives aren't like tapes -- a Beta tape can sit in a box in a clean, climate-controlled room, and if no accidents happen, it will very likely stay intact. TV stations have rooms filled with tapes that aren't touched for years. That same assumption can't be made about a drive. The most dangerous aspect to backups is if your backup failed within, say, the last six weeks, but you didn't know about it, and then your primary drive fails. And drives are a lot more likely to fail completely -- ie. you lose everything on it -- than a tape. Usually when a tape goes bad, you can rescue at least part of it.

So, one way to circumvent this is to redo the backup regularly. For longer projects, I'd recommend once every three to four weeks. The likelihood of both active and backup drives dying at the same time within that period is not high. Even better if you can backup to another drive as you renew the process, and only wipe the old backup when you've ascertained that everything is in order. That's why those modular storage units (like the CalDigit VR) are so popular. You can swap out new drives rather than buy a new enclosure per drive.


www.derekmok.com

>To the contrary; when you buy high-quality stuff it's easier to get suckered into thinking you're
>safe

That's a very good point. On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart once questioned whether it is the result of a freak storm or whether we are just sitting in a @#$%& boat. Let me illustrate that with a car analogy:

You need to travel, so you have a Porsche, and you have a Chinese Xiali in the garage. For our readers in Europe who don't know what a Xiali is, think Fiat. The Porsche is well engineered, the Xiali may not start up in winter (actually, for Xialis, if you slam the door too hard, the door may just fall off). Sure, buying a Porsche could buy you two Xialis or more. You think you're good to go, then the Porsche runs into engine problems, because all cars break down from time to time. Cool. You get into the Xiali, and you realize the Xiali was DOA.

Although brands like Caldigit has been mentioned frequently on the forums, it is fool's gold to think that putting your data onto a single Caldigit drive will keep your data safe. As mentioned, you are never safe. You can only reduce the odds of a catastrophe. And you reduce the odds greatly by having contingency plans against the more common issues. Two of the most common issues are data corruption and drive failures. So you do need more than one level of redundancy, especially if your data is critical.


>Point to your media drive, right now. Poof. It just died.

Also, at that point... Ask yourself what you are left with. If your answer is a single store bought drive, it's like having a Xiali in the garage. You better make another back up.

The Xiali:




www.strypesinpost.com

Personally, I'm a VW girl. Steady and reliable...

Here's yet another backup pitfall:

Always, always date- and time-stamp your backups. If you renew backups as I mentioned above, you'll have multiple backup copies. But you must know which one is which. If you feel safe in your backup(s) and your active data is destroyed, and you go to your backup only to realize it's from five months ago, it can cost you dearly. Or, you're working at 4AM after a 20-hour day, and you drag your files the wrong direction and overwrite your active current files with an older backup.
Don't laugh...it happens.

A few places I've worked have assistants backup data, and then take a screenshot of the folder structure, print it out and tape it to the drive enclosure. Not a bad idea, I thought, but you still need to add information to the folder names so you know when the files were made.


www.derekmok.com

>A few places I've worked have assistants backup data, and then take a screenshot of the folder
>structure, print it out and tape it to the drive enclosure.

This is a good solution.
[www.cdfinder.de]



www.strypesinpost.com

>Personally, I'm a VW girl.

I'm trying to think in terms of asian cars... Hmm.. Honda?



www.strypesinpost.com

nlittrell Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Wow--this has generated QUITE a discussion.

Didn't you know that storage solutions is right up there w/religion and politics.


-Andrew

Religion, politics and back-up...I'm learning.

Can't compare VW to Honda! It's like comparing weinerschnitzel to dumplings.

Great comments form Derek, Gerard, Jeff, Joey.

Has anyone looked for a backup to inexpensive flash cards like SD or Compact Flash? Those things are getting big and cheap. Wouldn't it be great to forgo backup up to disk entirely? The footprint, my God, IKEA will have to release shelving with little tiny anti-static slots...

- Loren

Today's FCP keytip:
Set a motion effect keyframe instantly with Control-K!

Your Final Cut Studio KeyGuide? Power Pack.
Now available at KeyGuide Central.
www.neotrondesign.com

Big? The largest CF cards I've seen top out at 32 gigs. Am I missing something?

I've been saying for a while that world manufacturing volume of flash RAM needs to increase by a factor of ten or more before it'll be truly practical for bulk data storage. After half a century (seriously; look it up) we've finally got that hard drive problem pretty much solved. But before we can transition to the next thing we need more fabs and manufacturers.

> Big? The largest CF cards I've seen top out at 32 gigs. Am I missing something?

The largest flash thumb drive I've seen is 256GB.

[www.amazon.com]

But they don't offer a good storage-to-price ratio. Copying is also slower than FireWire 400 or 800, though a lot faster than data DVDs.

There are much bigger solid-state storage units now, but they are extraordinarily expensive.

[www.promax.com]

Anybody used something like the Promax SSD unit? Is it viable for video? This unit has FireWire connections, but what about heat and stability? Real-time playback?


www.derekmok.com