Calling all Storage Ninjas!

October 17, 2011 5:51 AM

So I work in a non-profit (education-centric) and I've been asked to put together a new Mac system to help me in my video editing work. I also need to archive 20 years' worth of videos and keep them safe. I could really use your help!

I've been using my 5 year old Macbook for the past 8 months, so I guess they took pity on me.

Oh in case you're wondering, we have a lot of events throughout the year that I shoot and edit. I also put together videos to be shown at these events. These are then, put up online. I use Final Cut Pro and After Effects.

So I'm thinking of a Quad Core Mac Pro with Final Cut. It comes with a 1TB drive and I'm thinking of adding another 1TB to use as the scratch disk.

Is there anything else I need to consider? Do I need something like a Drobo for my work?

I also have 8TB worth of archival footage (the organization's been around for 20 years) lying around in 6 Western Digital HDDs. I'm very worried about them. One just died recently and I have nightmares about the rest of them failing too. What's the best/cost effective way to keep them safe?

We have a budget of about US$8,000 for this and the video editing system.

Thanks in advance!

posted by mordecai to computers & internet (4 answers total)

Get an SSD for your working disc. Load up the other three bays with 2-3 TB HDDs (aftermarket-- much cheaper and super easy to install). Get the bare minimum of RAM from Apple in the fewest DIMMs possible and likewise load the other slots up with aftermarket RAM.

Drobos are network-attached storage, so they have the advantage of being accessible over the network, but they're slow. If it fits in your budget, I would get Thunderbolt-enabled external storage. That'll be almost as fast as internal drives.
posted by supercres at 6:13 AM on October 17, 2011

@supercres thanks! SSD for the scratch disk or the boot disk? What do you recommend for archival btw?
posted by mordecai at 8:00 AM on October 17, 2011

The archival question has been answered a million times, but to summarise: keep the stuff you want to keep on raided disks, and keep a minimum of one backup copy somewhere physically separate from that. In a year's time 8TB disks should be available, so if you're not expecting any new footage, your price will come down soon. Remember to recreate the backups regularly, disks fail.
posted by devnull at 8:04 AM on October 17, 2011

Ideally both, but it depends how big your projects are.

I would do the archiving in the cloud-- Amazon S3 is cheap as long as you're not regularly uploading and downloading data. (That is, storage is cheap but transfer will cost you.)
posted by supercres at 8:06 AM on October 17, 2011