Media Storage Solutions for Videographers

When adding storage, consider how you're going to use it. Do you need fast throughput and high capacity for DV, HDV or HD editing; access from anywhere using any computer; long-term archival storage; additional network capacity; or easy and quick file portability? This Buyer's Guide presents solutions.

I have an 8GB flash drive hanging on my key chain. It holds student homework, my class presentations and exams. But my eight gigabytes pale in comparison to those of a student who dabbles in audio recording and keeps "a terabyte in the car." My flash drive cost $16 ($2 per gigabyte). My student's external hard drive, with its FireWire, USB and eSATA connectors, set him back all of $120 (only 12 cents per gigabyte!).

It's enough to give me capacity envy. But, with so much storage available for so little money, finding a cure is easy. The only dilemma is selecting the cure that works best for you.

Video editors need storage hardware with quick throughput and substantial capacity. Hard drives are the only solution and external drives make the most sense.

Uncompressed DV and standard HDV play back at about 3MB per second, and need about 11GB of hard drive space per hour of footage. Any hard drive can handle those specs. Sluggish playback issues arise when you do multitrack editing. The bottleneck is usually data transfer rates. To ensure smooth DV/HDV editing, buy hard drives that spin at 7,200 RPM or faster.

External hard drives are the easiest way to increase storage capacity for DV and HDV editing. Few of us want to crack open a PC case to install an internal drive. With external drives, simply plug in the USB 2.0 (universal serial bus) or FireWire (aka IEEE 1394 or i.LINK) external connector, and your computer running Windows or Mac OS X will recognize the newly-added drive within a few seconds. FireWire has a slight throughput performance edge (both transfer data at about 40MB/sec), but USB offers more portability because virtually all computers have USB ports.

eSATA (external serial advanced technology attachment) is a relative newcomer and offers some speed advantages, but few computers have eSATA connectors. The recently-developed FireWire 800 standard is twice as fast as the original FireWire, but users report compatibility problems, and it requires a different plug and port than FireWire 400. USB 3.0 products will start shipping in 2010. USB 3.0 is 10 times faster than USB 2.0.

Depending on the resolution (720 versus 1080) and frame rate (24 versus 30 versus 60), HD throughput rates and storage levels vary from about 40 to 100MB/sec and 100 to 400GB/hour of footage.

When you enter the HD realm, you need to think in terms of terabytes of storage and super-fast data transfer rates. In addition, to edit HD usually requires specialized hardware configured for your non-linear editor. For example, at last word, four companies - AJA, Bluefish444, Matrox and BMD - offered HD hardware solutions for Adobe Premiere Pro CS4.

On the storage side of the equation, to ensure smooth HD editing, you need a striped disk array (RAID 0). RAID 0 writes files across two hard drives to achieve a faster data transfer rate. A SCSI (small computer system interface) connection used to be the de facto high-speed connection standard for RAID systems, but internal SATA is almost on par with SCSI, is more readily available and is less expensive.

Hard drive rotation speeds for HD editing are also a consideration. 10,000-15,000 RPM drives will give you improved performance, but are more expensive and have lower capacities than their 7,200 RPM siblings.