Terabyte drive

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Treeline

Treeline

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I use the internal hard drive on my computer to store software and misc. data. All my projects are stored to an external hard drive (LaCie 160 GB) and it is beginning to load up. So far I've been storing everything and I've got many thousands of files, perhaps a few dozen worth keeping.

Last night I installed a second LaCie external drive, 1 TB. They don't view this as just another hard disk! I get the sense that this takes a bit of time to retrieve data, but it will store just about every word written since the dawn of time.

I'm planning to move everything from my regular drive over and keep using the first drive for data capture and manipulation - but for current projects only. The big disk will be an archive.

Anyone else using large capacity drives? How are you integrating them into a project studio?
 
Avastor Drives

I'd stay away from LaCies if you can. I just lost a bunch of sessions on a LaCie D2 after the drive failed to mount.

I would recommend trying an Avastor drive. They are specifically designed for hard disk recording. They're a little pricey, but it's your music and you can't afford to lose it right? Check 'em out here:

prodataplus.com

avastor.com
 
For every person that loves a certain drive, someone else hates them.

ps- no matter who makes the box, the drive inside is still probably going to be Seagate, Western Digital, Fujitsu, or Samsung. All hard drives fail eventually, and whether any particular one does or not at any given time is pretty much luck of the draw. :)
 
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Treeline said:
I I get the sense that this takes a bit of time to retrieve data, but it will store just about every word written since the dawn of time.
Click to expand...

You know, that's what they said about 30Mb hard drives --- "We'll NEVER fill 'em up!!"
Give it about a year or two and you'll be screaming about running out of space again....

I get the feeling from your post that you think the big drives will be absurdly slow. They are not.
There is no reason to think of them as only for archival storage.
 
Make Backups!

I'd be very wary of cutting-edge drives, i.e. largest drives on the market, from anyone. While convenient and relatively cheap, I would make sure you have a backup of anyting you care about - well, I'd say that for any size drive, actually.

Buy 2 if they're cheap and mirror your data. Use a utility to keep them in sync rather than having the OS actually mirror them with software RAID.

Or you can archive each project to DVD, but after doing that for a couple projects that span 2 or more, you'll likely start skipping the backups.

As for manufacturers, I do agree that everything can/will fail. I've seen and had way too many WD large drives fail to consider buying them again in the near future. I'm happily using Seagate drives with better success now. I've seen them fail too, but not as often.
 
I agree with Tim- big doesn't mean slow- but certainly for anything where you need speed firewire is a must. I see a lot of inexpensive USB-only drives...which is fine, as long as you don't mind the speed hit. We just put in a 500GB ethernet drive as a media server plugged into a wireless router doing Gigabit ethernet.....which means wireless streaming DVDs to anywhere in the house...wicked..

And Whalebone's got it. Back up everything. I use drives for convenience, but if you really give a shit, the stuff you want to keep will go on disks. After a nice afternoon reliving the past and burning 15 DVDs, I have about 10,000 irreplaceable pictures spanning 25 years in a box in my closet.
 
I do a lot of video work so I plow through drive space and have a number of large drive that go through the rotations here. Pain in the butt, really. I have a 500G drive that's FULL with a project I've been working on for 2 years. The project is "done" and delivered... do I format the drive and get it back into play or is the &^$! client going to call me 5 minutes afterwards with a bit more work for me on that project?

While I lust after a TB drive... I haven't bitten the bullet, yet. The largest drive I've had to do data recovery on so far is a 500G that had about 300G on it. It took 5 days. DAYS. For 5 days my computer was completely occupied crunching though the drive reconstructing it. A tera would be on the order of 10 days to recover if it went south IF I had a second one to copy the data to...

And Boingoman, if I recall correctly... those homebrew dvd's will only last 10 years or so before the dye in them fades to the point where its unreadable. If you really want to preserve those photos I'd PRINT them. Then your great grandchildren can find them and "Who the hell is this?!" instead of finding the DVD's and saying "What the hell are these?"
 
Yeah, the DVD thing is basically a temporary fallback until someone comes up with a way to make negatives from digital pictures.
 
I'm using 5 500GB Seagates in my recording system. Considering those are now the smallest in Seagates "high capicity" series according to them, its going up annd up. I like the data throughput the 32MB cache drives give me, thats why I use the 500s.
 
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