Sure, hard drive have became very reliable but I still wouldn't put en expensive production on the line by archiving all the raw footage on hard drive unless you use two sets of drive maybe.

I am waiting to see how XDCAM EX to XDCAM HD archiving works. An EX camera coupled with the new U1 USB XDCAM drive could be a very dood solution for archiving.

Thierry.

Back-ups
 

You have 2 options when you run with card only technology it's the same mindset as with professional digital photography you back up onto 2 separate drives, Sony's XDCAM drive is still a disk inside a shell and if you are forced to run with USB2 to transfer it will not be quick. The slowest link in my download chain is FW400 which is 2x faster than USB2. I mainly use SATA drives to park my footage onto. It takes me 16mins to transfer 2 hours of footage from my Firestore (FW400) to my MacPro.

As this time, it is less an issue of USB2 vs. FW than the write speed of the XDCAM device. The first generation of XDCAM HD decks and cameras could theoratically write at 75mbps but in reality, it is more around 60mpbs or even less. I am told the new PDW-U1 XDCAM drive is about twice as fast so archiving with it may just be a good scheme.

Thierry.

In theory USB2 is faster than FW400 (480Mbps vs 400Mbps). Most USB2 components use cheap controllers however so throughput never approach's theoretical capabilities. I think Sony may approach this XDCAM USB drive a bit different though so USB2 is unlikely to be a bottleneck for it

...and presumably the non-guaranteed-constant throughput of USB2 won't matter with EX backup/capture, as it's really just file transfers (unlike capturing moving tape, where the throughput rate has to be guaranteed, hence the need for Firewire).

USB 2.0 has a higher burst transfer speed but FW400 has a higher sustained transfer speed. I think the speed of the laser on the drive itself is going to be the limiting factor though, not the I/O between the drive and the computer.


-A

We were demoing the U1 at IBC and it was tranfering at a little over 3 times real time for 35Mb footage. This makes it a little faster than my camera which is normally around 2.5 x real time and gives a real world transfer speed of about 90Mb/sec (given than 35Mb footage is often under 35Mb/sec).

Archive on discs
 

I have a question regarding archival on hds. I would very much like to do the following: dump the SxS-Cards on RAID-1 (mirrored) HDs, then shelve one of them and – during editing – use the other one as single disc (or in JBOD-mode in the same enclosure). Is this possible? Do HDs from a RAID-1 configuration work as single discs?

Why not just put it on two separate hard drives, if that is how you intend to use them? (You still get the security from two physically separate drives. I don't think you can just separate RAIDed drives like that.)

Because then you would have to copy the files from one HD to the other. This takes time.