How Much Storage Space Do I Need?

[Phil Maker]

I'm shooting a 90 minute feature on the RED in 4K. Can I squeeze it on a 2 TB HD?

I'm considering buying two of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136145

Will they do the trick? I have only about 2-4 grand in the budget for storage.

Thanks!

[Cail Young]

10 mins at 4K 2:1 25fps is about 16GB. So 144GB for 90 mins, if you shoot 10:1 you're going to fill a 2TB drive easily. Most productions will shoot over 10:1, although if you're super-conservative you'll be under.

I would suggest buying 500GB drives (best $/GB at the moment) in bulk and using generic Oxford based enclosures. Buying a prebuilt 2TB (really 2x1TB) unit is asking for trouble, really. Mainly because to use all 2TB you need to be in RAID 0 - i.e. "scary RAID".

[Brandon Fraley]

what about FW400 vs FW800. I'm assuming I'll be editing off these drives. How are you guys doing it?

[Justin McAleece]

Burly 8 Bay Rack Mount w/Port Multiplier 6TB MGBurly8RPM-6T $2687.00

set up as RAID 5 with RocketRAID 2314 - $200

For less than $3k you will have RAID 5 redundancy and speed over 2 little cables with hot swap and plenty of storage. It has worked great for me so far.

Highly recommended, and super fast. I have an 8 core mac but there's no reason this or something very similar shouldn't work on a windows machine.

FW400/800 USB2? No, You really don't want to be going through anything else but SATA at this price point. Look at the Burly boxes and find one that fits your budget, you'll be happy you did.

[Phil Maker]

Thanks Lotar1.

So does that mean I can copy the footage and make a redundant copy simultaneously? If so, is one of those things enough for two copies of an entire 90 min movie? (assuming I shoot at a 10:1 shooting ratio)

[Justin McAleece]

it's not completely redundant, but if one drive does go down, you're still covered. look up RAID 0, 1, 5, 50 definitions on the web and you'll get it.

[Rocco Schult]

Thanks Lotar1.

So does that mean I can copy the footage and make a redundant copy simultaneously? If so, is one of those things enough for two copies of an entire 90 min movie? (assuming I shoot at a 10:1 shooting ratio)

In theory you can do 2 copies via R3DDatamanager simultaneously, but haven't tested it yet.
We have a license here, just did not use it yet.
You can't with a usual operating system, the system handles it as 2 tasks and either puts it in a row or if at the same time jumps between the drives and it takes even more than double the time.

[Rocco Schult]

what about FW400 vs FW800. I'm assuming I'll be editing off these drives. How are you guys doing it?

If you are on a Raid with more performance (this includes scary raid,-) you'll profit from FW800 (my little scary LaCie disc with 2 striped drives in it) does about 80-90-MB/s, pretty quick.
For a single drive it is not that much of a performance boost, if any at all.
Current drives max out 40MB/sec. and FW400 theoretical and nearly practical maximum is at 50MB/sec.
Bottleneck will probably be the drive, excluding cache-reads which could go higher.

[Robert Mott]

You will regret using Western Digital. I have had 5-7 of them fail on me. Most any other brand seem to be more stable.

[sbcooler]

I have 14 Western Digital Drives now for 2 years...using them massively and so far no problems. I've had 1 Maxtor Drive go on me (I think now owned by Seagate). My Lacie drive I once had a humming and sent it back to the manufacturer and even know a few weeks out of warranty they fixed it, but it's scary if you don't back up...I paid $4,000 for data recovery and I should have paid $10K, but got a deal! It was a RAID 0 (4 drives)!

Anyway, as I've said no problem with external Western Digital drives...and they are absolutely super quiet which I love.

Just my 2 cents.