Red Drive: what does it format to be?

[zak forrest]

Im thinking of getting either a 500gb portable fw800 drive or maybe a 320gb drive. if the Red Drive formats out to be less than 320gb, and fits on one of these 320gb fw800 drives, i might want to get a few of those instead of the 500gb drives. does anyone know what the red drives format out to be?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Don't have my hands one one to check yet, but....

I'm going to say it's right about 298GB. You have two 160GB drives figured as 160 billion bytes. That's 160,000,000,000 / 1,073,741,824 (binary size def of bytes/GB) = 149.011GB. You will lose about 8MB and possibly some other overhead for filesystem and RAID configuration.

If you go buy a 320GB hard drive for backup, the RED DRIVE should fit OK. You will have the same size restrictions there -- about 298GB formatted capacity. So just don't max out your RED DRIVE when shooting. Save 3% or so and you won't have to worry about those last few megabytes copying or not. But yes, could save you some money vs. 500GB drives.

[zak forrest]

man this is so stingy.. i should just get the 500gb drives.. hahaha

[Alexis Hanawalt]

Or you can neatly fit 3 320GB's worth of data on one 1TB drive...

[Jeff Kilgroe]

man this is so stingy.. i should just get the 500gb drives.. hahaha

Hehe... You might thank yourself after you have backed up 150 drives and saved yourself enough money to buy a new lens or new workstation or something.


Or you can neatly fit 3 320GB's worth of data on one 1TB drive...

Yeah, but $ per GB is nearly 85% higher on those 1TB drives. You know, since we're thinking of pinching those pennies anyway. :)

[Brent J. Craig]

Costco has quad-interface 1TB drives for $249. Seems reasonable to me.

[Greg Huson]

The only advantage of the external 1tb external drives is they're actually dual 500s (in most cases) and you can internally mirror them using the built-in controller. Our archive system for editing has been 500gig BARE drives in a Sata-to-FW external case, then anti-static plastic bag. Spin it up every few months to make sure it doesn't stick. Plan to use the same system for Red #2887 (or was it 2897?) when that arrives sometime this spring/summer. (Although we're also adding an LTO drive for www.digitalservicestation.com) Don't buy ONE extra external drive, either. By as many at a time as you can - I think they're $89 at Fry's right now.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Costco has quad-interface 1TB drives for $249. Seems reasonable to me.

Er... Not on their site and not at the two Costco stores I have near me. They have the WD MyBook 1TB drive for $279. I wouldn't touch that one with a 10ft. pole.

The best HDD deal I've seen at Costco (and they have it right now) is the Maxtor 750GB for $174.99. It would nicely hold two RED DRIVES plus about a dozen 8GB CF cards. Still there are better deals to be had out there.

[Dylan Reeve]

I'd recommend an 2-drive FW800/eSATA enclosure (depending on your connection options) - one that supports RAID-1 mirroring.

Chuck two affordable 750GB drives in it in RAID-1 - you end up with one totally redundantly mirrored 750GB drive - enough for around 500 minutes of footage. That's plenty.

I'd highly recommend against using any external drive without redundancy - once you copy it off the original recording device, you want to be damn sure that nothing will happen to it.