storage solution
I have been running my small production company for about a year and half now.
Within this time I deciced to focus on corporate and non profit organizations. The major problem that I have with these projects is space. Unlike most wedding businesses where when your done editing you delete the files, for most part I have to hold on to all the datas of a project in order to use it for years to come in making their future videos and making the job easier but space is a problem. till now I offered my client to provide me with an external HD where I create the project from beg to ending on it. I dont feel it efficient. and extra $250 for the client. past that issue I dont feel safe about any external HDs, every tme I turn one on, I'm affraid of it crashing etc since 2 have gone bad on me. What do u guys suggest and what do u do? |
Some options would be:
A- Burn onto optical discs. The problem right now is that this takes forever. B- Put material onto two different hard drives. Wait for rebate deals on hard drives. Enclosures can be had for a fairly low price now... even eSATA I believe. C- Setup a storage server on a PentiumIII or better machine (yes, a pentium III will be fine). With a compatible RAID controller card, you could setup a RAID 5 which will protect somewhat against drive failure (although sometimes two drives will go down at once). RAID doesn't protect against user error. D- There are computer tape backup solutions. High initial cost, but they let you have multiple backups and things like that. |
can i compress the data after it it done so it takes less space on a HD and reexpand?
how>? |
You could enable NTFS compression on the drive, or use an archival program along the lines of winRAR. However, you will get extremely little compression with video files. DV for example already employs DCT compression, so you will not gain much compression over that. Animation and Huffyuv codecs already utilize lossless compression, so file sizes after re-compression may be slightly (and insignificantly) larger.
It's generally not worth the time. |
Dan, I agree with Glenn on compressing your files. The only advantage or using WinRAR on video files (using the "Store" option, which takes VERY little time) is that it will allow you to chop up the video file to 4.6 GB files for spanning to multiple DVDs. I do this once in a while when needed, and it works great. The only downside is the slow burntime, but newer DVD-RW drives are pretty quick now.
I find that storing the data on external HDs is pretty inexpensive and easy to implement, and you only need the drives on when you want to write or retrieve data, otherwise leave them turned off. That'll save on your "mean time before failure". I will soon be getting a PC set up with SATA drives and will be going RAID-0. I've decided to mount (2) 500GB drives into 1 RAID-0 config (attached to a controller), then mount another 2 drives in a RAID-0 config (to a second controller), etc. This is cheap from the controller stand-point (you can get controllers PCI for about $65.00) and you'll have some redundancy because every second drive is striped. You can also build this machine up as needed. The only downsides are the size of the machine (it's a whole computer after all), and the possible noise. However, that's not too big of a deal, as I'd only boot the machine when needed (hibernat mode helps this). |
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RAID 1+0 and 0+1 would be more accurate terminology, which indicates the order of the 'RAIDing'. |
I think I might have misled you all with my wording. Actually, I'm using two seperate RAID controllers (two drives per card) and treating them as sperate logical drives (e.g., D: & E:). Controller "A" mirrors LUN 0 and 1, and controller "B" mirrors LUN 2 and 3. I am not mirroring the raid controllers' data between each other.
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Consider tape. Here's reasons why.
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http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/...ifespan_1.html http://photocollector.net/TipCD.htm |
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Just buy hard drives and swap out. But beware of the MYBOOKS from Western Digital, I recently had an annoying experience with one, went back and picked up a lacie external instead. But I'm at that point where I'm going to just start buying internals and swapping. It's cheaper.
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