The best types of hard drives for all stages of production
One of the most significant hazards in video content is Great Fear: Losing all of your hard work. If your work isn't stored properly, an entire shoot is a complete loss. However, the good news is that we have a wealth of technological options and methods that allow us to duplicate valuable work. We contacted Larry O'Connor, Founder and CEO of Larry O'Connor. Powerhouse storage solutions company OWC , to help us gather all the necessary equipment to handle every kind of video scenario. Check out Larry's top techniques for storage, and the best practices to ensure your video project is secure throughout the process.
A brief definition of hard drives
Hard disk drives (HDD) are the most widely-used and well-known storage devices used by the computer industry and other drives for the last few years. Solid state drives (SSD) They are like the HDD however, they use flash memory without moving components inside. NVM Express for Non-Volatile Memory (NVMe ) is a communications standard that has been designed to maximize flash technology performance to deliver more speedy SSD performance through PCIe.
Okay, on to the gear
Pre-pro
With all the key elements that could determine the success or failure of a project -- script, casting locations, equipment and crew required --- You must ensure that you are ensuring that your "pre-pro" job is accessible and secure. Save early and save often Make sure to select storage devices with high capacity and less costly.
Envoy Pro EX with USB-C
$119.00 -- $479.00 The best to use for: Off-site or location scouting visits with clients
This sleek dust-proof, waterproof design fits into your pocket, making it both durable and versatile.
Mercury Elite Pro Dock $430 -- $1,430 $330$1,430
The best for: Studio, desktop devices The dual drive, PC-friendly device provides speed, versatility and up to 32TB backup and storage capacity.
Production
Like location is important for real estate transactions, storage speed is key in the stage of production. The footage you're working on is massive and you might not be in the serene of your office or your pre-production location. No matter where you are you must ensure that the footage won't take an eternity to sort through.
Accelsior 4M2 PCIe
$529.75 -- $1,999.75 Best to use for: Controlled studio environments and on-set backups
Whether you're using the newest Mac Pro, a legacy Mac, or a PC tower on set, you'll want the Accelsior card SSD. It's the most powerful SSD OWC offers (over 6,000MB/s) which is perfect for streaming and editing large format video and graphics files without hiccups.
ThunderBay Line - $710 -- $2,800
Best to use for: Large-scale projects
When your project needs both speed and massive capacity then look no further than OWC's ThunderBay line. Need something compact to fit on a crowded set or DIT cart? Consider ThunderBay Miniature HTML0 .
Delivery from the point of delivery to studio
There's a chance that you'll have to deliver your work to your editor or colleagues before you can get it back home. Here are the hard drives that are durable to be shipped with.
Mercury Helios 3S - $229.99
The best to use for: Durability, backing the shooting day The Mercury Helios as well as the U.2 NVMe Interchange System were created to connect workflows between production and post. It brings you quick U.2 NVMe SSDs' performance and ease of swapping drives in an incredibly safe, portable carrier. This light, durable SSD can be used swiftly take a full day's worth filming and forward it to be edited, all while paying less for shipping because of its lightweight structure.
ThunderBlade The cost is $729. $2,299
Best for: T ravel productions, shooting outside
Designed to be rugged, dependable and blazing fast The ThunderBlade can be found on the road, on set, and in the edit bay. It has a robust hardshell case that makes it transportable and shippable. It is small but mighty offering up to 8TB of storage (with the ability to read at 2800MB/s speeds and 2450MB/s write speeds).
Post-production
The majority of drives under development can be utilized to edit post. Actually, that's where the ThunderBlade, Mercury Helios, and ThunderBay mini shine as they are able to be used right to edit.
Jupiter mini NAS
The best for: Real-time collaborative editing
The desktop with 5-Bay Jupiter mini is a great option for big-scale group projects. It's tiny enough for bags, and yet has massive space (up up to 70TB). Plus, it's capable of working with most major video editing systems.
Archiving
Mercury Pro LTO
The best to use for: Saving and forgetting it for 30 years
After all the creativity and editing has been completed and the editing is complete, you'll need to take one last step to finishing the project. When archiving your work, it is important to select equipment which can be stored on shelves and will not erase your work after sitting idly for several months. Mercury Pro LTO Mercury Pro LTO will be on sale in June 2020 for purchase, so you can save your work now up to 3 decades.
A word of caution on Terabytes
A majority of these drives refer to terabytes of storage so for some human reference 1TB of hard drive capacity =