A terrabyte of disk space!

[Robert Knecht Schmidt]

I'm feeling out all my different options for having a terrabyte or more of disk space on hand for video editing. Has anyone else gone this route before? What's the best/cheapest way to amass mega storage that's reliable, fast enough for standard definition DV, and inexpensive given that a lot of data will need to be stored?

[Rob Lohman]

Speed should not be a problem now-a-days. Getting a terabyte
cheap is. Do you really need *that* much? I'm personally going
to go with around 60 - 150 GB for video stuff and offline this to
DVD+R/+RW I think, not sure yet.

Reliability (and price) go down like this:

- SCSI RAID array (very expensive)
- SCSI disks without array
- IDE RAID array
- IDE disks without array (most cheap)

Going to get a terabyte of space is going to be a painfull
experience. Some of these options listed above might not
even be possible inside one system (because of the PCI slots,
cooling, space inside your PC). You can also buy external
harddisk clusters (these are SCSI or IDE over firewire). But
now we are getting very exepensive.

I do not know what options exist with firewire drives. You
can probably daisy-chain a lot of these, so this might be your
best option. But then you need to employ software RAID if
you want real-time protection (use Windows 2000 or XP for
that).

Another solution instead of RAID (which is a real-time,
a tad expensive thing) might be to mirror each file at night.
Get yourself a package (Windows 2000 can do this native
I believe) that mirrors one (or more) partitions of data to
another one (or more, preferred on another disc) during the
night. Then you are not protected during the day time, but you
should not loose too much work anyway. Most of the time
you can see (mostyle HEAR) a harddisk crash coming before
it happens.

Good luck!