Almost everything else can conceivably be recreated. BackBlaze can also ship you a physical hard drive if you need to recover your data as quickly as possible. First, this is a great site with very well written articles. I guess I don’t quite have my head wrapped around the bandwidth part of it. LTO-8 tapes provide 12TB native capacity per tape, and up to 750MB/sec transfer rate. RAID 5 also writes data across all the drives in the array, which increases performance, but it also provides parity. NTFS is a Microsoft file system that is secure, reliable and less susceptible to corruption. I suspect i’m going to end up with needing 50 to 60 TB to finish the film…not counting backup….so 120? We got to the point where multiple editors working alone can no longer effectively tackle certain projects and move towards collaborative editing (and entire production) seems like a good idea. External drives have to be mounted at least once every 30 days. Appreciate any feedback, critique on my workflow, etc, SSD 1: 480GB x 4 Mirrored Pairs (960 GB usable), HHD 1: 2x 4TB Seagate SATA drive Mirrored, back up storage for SSD. I don’t recommend ExFAT to be used on any drives. You should always use a journaling file system. First, about RAID 5. In particular this challenge is with shareable storage. If you mirror two RAID 0 arrays, and one fails, the second has your data, yes, but it’s still very much at risk because it has no redundancy. RAID is used for speed, high-capacity volumes, and drive parity. I had planned to back up project files to an offline USB backup drive I already have. If you need the best portable storage for video editing, use an external SSD such as the SanDisk Extreme or Extreme Pro Portable SSD. There may be nothing wrong with a 4-bay DAS like the Promise Pegasus 32 R4, it all depends on the bandwidth requirements of your media. I have one questions regarding consumer USB hard drives for media backups/archive: You’re mentioning in paragraph “Buying Cloud Storage” that “External drives have to be mounted at least once every 30 days”. A desktop LTO tape drive is an excellent idea for long term archive. Essential editing commands. I need to better wrap my head around how it works with these files and bandwidth. Also I imagine you’re the only person using it, in that you’re not sharing it between multiple editors. What would be the difference if I just buy 1 X 8TB external harddrive? However, with a four bay enclosure, you’re limited with RAID options. It’s easy to blur the lines and think of these all as simply duplication of your video files, but each serves a different purpose. You mentioned they are two drives each? However, it has no mirroring or parity. You would have relatively limited total bandwidth from a four drive RAID 5, probably around 350MB/sec or so, write speed would be less. https://www.pelican.com/us/en/product/rack-mount-cases/3u/mac-rack/mr1907-05-29-05/. I notice that most sailing YouTubers use rugged portable hard drives. However, rebuilds take time, especially if you are using large drives. LTO tape is fast, reliable and has a long lifespan. What would be pros and cons of using a NAS system for editing on the go? You should keep backups of all your project files, and it can be useful to have them readily available in case a need arises to reopen a previous project for changes or alterations. This doubles the cost of your online storage, but it means one entire array can experience a complete failure, and the second will seamlessly take over with no interruption. This means your data is still protected while the new drive you’ve swapped in is rebuilding. Hello Richard. Before you start shopping for video editing storage solutions, it’s important to have a strategy in mind. Take a look also at the QNAP enclosures also. Any real benefit from RAID 0 with only the 2 HDDs? The process of editing has often been thought of as somewhat of a dark art — a secretive process that happens behind closed doors. 2. You can use a USB-C Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter cable. In trying to figure out the best storage solution for my upcoming projects, I’ve come across several posts/articles claiming that RAID 5 is no longer a stable/safe solution today. The only exception might be if it’s mirrored to an additional identical RAID 0 array, but even then it’s much better and safer to use RAID 5 for both. Hi Kristin, that’s amazing! If you’re trying to save money can you RAID some cheaper, “slower” SSDs and get the most bang for your buck and more than enough bandwidth for a 4K workflow? Regarding RAID 5, the things I was reading is that for reasons I couldn’t understand, with larger capacity drives of today, if a drive fails in a RAID 5, the likelihood of getting an error during the rebuild thus losing it all is now “too high”. Your choice will depend on whether you are primarily running a Windows or Mac environment. Hi Donald, just wanted to acknowledge your questions. Seeing that your USB C 3.2 gen 2 isn’t giving you great actual throughput, and you don’t have Thunderbolt capability, you could definitely look at a NAS enclosure with 10GbE ethernet. What codec, resolution, and/or camera(s) are they? My current workflow is like this. I also think you’d probably get on well with the R4 by the sounds of it. I look forward to reading about your favorite workflow tools. The two lines in red are popular HD flavours for comparison. For all other Mac users, I’ve recommended and used the ATTO Thunderlink NT2102 interfaces for years. The thing is, no matter how big that pipe is, the volume of water that will flow through it depends on how much water can flow out of your storage, not really on the size of the pipe (unless the pipe is too small, then the pipe itself becomes the bottleneck). I don’t think a mirrored pair of two drive RAID 0 arrays is better than a four drive RAID 5. I think this little RAID system would have as fast a connection as any server I worked on at my employer (again, I don’t really know since I never concerned myself with it). Upgrading to a cloud workflow for video processing, editing, encoding, storage, and delivery can help streaming service providers reduce management and maintenance costs, boost operational efficiency, enable scalability, and reinforce security. Can you just leave them unmounted for years in the closet or is there a rule of thumb for activating them regularly to keep them healthy/long-lasting? With RAID 6, you have redundancy for two drive failures. Since the drives are solid state, I don’t think it will require a lot of power. These are Thunderbolt 2 interfaces and provide two 10GbE ports. If you are a one-person shop, the best storage system to use for audio or video editing is a RAID that’s directly connected to your computer; this is called “Direct-Attached Storage.” The benefits of direct-attached storage are, generally, that it’s the fastest, cheapest and easiest to use. There are, of course, a number of ways to do this stuff, but several key concepts remain consistent no … ... but they can still provide adequate capacities and speeds for video editing. However, cache files are temporary, and can be deleted, and recreated by the software at any time. LTO tapes can also be used to backup data that won’t change, such as source camera media, but is better suited to long term archive. They can’t be striped together as a single volume. Short Answer. If that’s enough, you could use it as online storage. Keep in mind if you configure an R4 four-bay for RAID 5, you will lose one drive worth of usable capacity and 25% of the maximum possible bandwidth. This is an excellent way to maintain an offsite backup of media on your external hard drives. As a video creator your camera source video files are the most valuable thing you have. Storage Solutions. With one failure your data is “critical” (zero protection) until you replace the failed drive, and it has time to rebuild. There are different types of storage you can use for video post production, each useful for different functions and parts of your overall workflow. Hi Richard I am a “micro budget” filmmaker and we are shooting 6k Raw video. If I understand correctly, if I were to go with the Pegasus 32 R4, it sounds like the bottleneck would not be the connection, but the hard drives themselves along with choosing RAID 5 configuration would be. Then use pairs of cheap USB hard drives as cloned backups of your media. You can think of the interface between your system and storage like a water pipe. Choose a NAS with integrated 10GbE ethernet ports. I also categorize the common kinds of files in video post production, and suggest what kind of storage is best for them. Can you recommend a tape drive that is solid and will work for my needs based on what i’ve mentioned above. This makes BackBlaze B2 Cloud Storage far more affordable than Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud. Let’s break down the broad categories of files you’ll need to consider in post production. The best storage for video editing is not the same for everyone. So thank you for taking the time that you have invested and sharing your knowledge! IT’s a be frustrating because the AMD system and same mother board that followed mine offers Thunderbolt…which comparing that to a NAS—well I think is much better, At the end of 2021 I will update my editing system to handle my needs but right now it’s this particular area that is causing us a headache. If you don’t have enough capacity to keep a library of all your non-active camera source media on your primary online storage, consider keeping it duplicated onto cloned external hard drives. The storage workflow I had originally planned on: *Offline storage: 4 bay QNAP USB 3.1 gen1 RAID 5 (24TB usable). As for the DisplayPort, this has to do with the fact that Thunderbolt combines, or multiplexes PCIe and DisplayPort data and sends it through the same cable. In terms of standard SSD drives at the moment you can go up to 4TB and for that matter I would recommend these: https://www.span.com/product/Samsung-SSD-860-EVO-MZ-76E4T0B-EU-2-5-SATA-6Gb-4TB-SSD~63270/ref=l, I’m thinking my setup would be the following in a RAID 6 Array with a 10GbE network switch: Online Storage QNAP TVS-872XT 8-Bay NAS Enclosure Slot 1: Samsung-SSD-970-EVO-PLUS NVMe-2TB-SSD Slot 2: Samsung-SSD-970-EVO-PLUS NVMe-2TB-SSD Slot 3 – 8: Samsung-SSD-860-EVO 2.5 SATA-6Gb-4TB-SSD. It will also work on mechanical hard drives. I’ll get back to you with some ideas. Here are some possible scenarios. Take a look at a cloud backup option like Backblaze, their personal plan allows you to keep unlimited cloud backups of attached external drives for only $60 per year. What am I missing? So if one drive fails, you don’t lose data. If any single drive in the array fails, it can be removed, and a new replacement drive swapped into the array. To make things a bit more confusing, the terms “online” and “offline” are also used to describe source video files, and low resolution, compressed video “proxies”. Anyway look forward to seeing your updated version to this article. Absolutely I have some thoughts which may or may not be helpful but I’ll need to get back to you on the weekend to write properly. Cookies help us deliver our Services. This article is actually only a month or so old, I should really add a “last modified” or “last updated” date showing because I agree with you, it’s hard to find depth of information, but also information that is relevant since these things change so quickly. They were mostly speaking in maths so I was lost but it scared me from considering RAID 5. Let’s say you have 20 projects, which means 40 consumer hard drives in total (20 per different location). So that would not increase bandwidth of the data coming from either of the arrays, regardless of the data throughput of the interface. I don’t believe there’s a bandwidth concern with 3D files because I believe they’re loaded into the software and that’s that…not streaming from file per say (getting out of my comfort zone of what I’m saying…so I’m not confident of my answer). I have only used these, so can’t compare to others. The truth is that the essential tasks of video editing are fairly accessible if you take the time to learn the essentials. BackBlaze also offer Business Backup plans for multiple computers, and offer NAS backup at $5 per month per TB for storage, and $10 per TB for download. You’ll also learn about common RAID levels, and the best file system choices to format your drives. An array of hard drives (or SSD) can be striped together as a single volume in a few different ways. If you’re running a PC, you can get any single or dual port 10GbE NIC such as the Synology 10Gb Ethernet Adapter, or just about any 10GbE NIC you can find. Project files are usually small, and easy to back up. I want to check some current pricing on a few things and see what makes sense. Would you recommend something else? This media, which isn’t actively being used, but needs to remain accessible, and can’t be permanently archived is a good candidate for nearline storage. Library media files are video, audio, graphics, images, design elements, and any common files that you use regularly in all your projects. Working from online storage alone with no backup of your files is not a strategy at all. Seagate Backup Plus Portable 5TB External Hard Drive HDD – Black USB 3.0 for PC Laptop and Mac, 2 Months Adobe CC Photography (STDR5000100) ($150) – https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01LZP2B23?tag=hawk-future-20&linkCode=ogi&th=1&psc=1&ascsubtag=trd-us-1055147709447012900-20. So if one drive in the array fails, your data is still protected against a possible (unlikely) failure of a second drive. You plug them in to update the data on them whenever you add new media to your working storage. 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