4K storage options?

We are looking at an upcoming show that will be shot in 4k and we need a storage solution for 4 simultaneous connections. Budget is not set yet, so all recommendations welcome. I think we're hoping for 50TB to start, but something scalable would be even awesomer.

Any ideas?

The new G-Tech G-Speed Studio XL 64TB Thunderbolt 2 RAID [www.g-technology.com] shared via Thunderbolt (or 10GigE from TB) on one Mac acting as a basic file-server to the other 4.



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Ooh nice one Ben. I've sent the details to IT.

Do bear in mind if you use it in RAID 5 (which you should) you effectively get 1x 8TBs worth of HDD less - so the formatted capacity would be 56TB with 1 drive redundancy. Also thats getting to the 90% full mark if you are going to go for 50TB! Although you could simply have a separate TB2 drive for renders etc.

You should also budget for a complete backup too!



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Yeah but at that price we can afford a second one for backup easy. Our most recent (12 part) series came in at about 11TB, but we'll be doing re-versioning for different sales, and each episode is about a 65GB export, so we figured 25TB per series should be plenty of headroom. Except the 4k one, of course. Not really looking forward to managing all that data!

Yes getting two of those actually would make sense - exports and managing data at 1350MBps is a lot easier than firewire or USB3 speeds!

I have two separate RAID 5/6 running somewhere between 600MBps and 1200MBps (depending how full) and transferring from one to the other you get very fast transfers.

I'd go for two 64TB TB2s RAID 5 (56TB formatted) with a nightly backup of any new media and projects onto the second unit matching the file structure exactly (but manually) until you reach the 60-70% full (~40TB) mark then think about getting another set if you really are heading for 25TB per series.

I'd also backup onto separate HDDs using an HDD dock and then those stored offsite. Also use a cloud based backup for just the projects too.



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Why manual backup Ben? No auto? We do have a (yay) production manager who squirrels away copies of things all over the place, so I think extra backups on externals would happen semi-automatically lol.

Thanks for the advice - our IT department comes from a graphics based background and they're not used to the sizes and speeds we need, so the more info I can supply canned the better.

If you had a mirrored backup that automatically updates files as and when they change you could end up at the end of the day screwing up a perfect backup copy of a file with a newly corrupted one.

And when I say manual - I mean more like Carbon Copy Cloner being set to run at the end of the work day rather than during everyone's work day with incremental backups and modified files being temporarily stored and pruned when necessary.

You could do a time machine backup but that would require you to open up the state and restore whereas doing it the way I suggest means if you had a total hardware failure on the RAID or accidentally deleted the entire drive you would have a complete ready to go backup that you only need plug-in instead.

Also look to getting APC Redundant PSUs that will cover the drives and the main Mac serving at the very least if not all your Macs plus at least one monitor on each.



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Thanks for all that Ben. I've passed it all on, and it looks like the best option to me and the Production Manager. What IT decides of course could be a completely different matter.