On a brief stopover from our Portland Conference (which went very well, by the way, thanks for asking) we stopped by the storage providers LaCie to take a look at some of their new products. While the company headquarters is in France; the US operation, where they run tech support, sales, and still have a factory that assembles their product is located in Hillsboro Oregon. [image:blog_post:14083] We sat down to take a look at some of their video related products, and first off was the Biggest S2S, a 5 bay tower system that in full striped mode can handle uncompressed HD video. This tower comes with it's own interface card, and is available in 2.5TB, or 5TB models. On the opposite side of the size spectrum was the Little Big Disk Quadra. A tiny bus-powered RAID 0 array of two 2.5 inch hard drives, in capacities of 400GB, and 500GB. Perfect for editing with a laptop on location. Right smack dab in the middle was the 2big Triple. A medium sized case holding two removable bays, with a Firewire 400, 800, and USB 2.0 interface. It changes between RAID1, o, or JBOD configurations, and comes in 1TB, 1.5TB, and 2 TB capacities. Although well known as a storage comapny, LaCie also makes some very interesting displays. One model that will be of interest to video editors is the LaCie 324. It's a 24 inch LCD panel, that incorporates a Faroudja video signal processor that is specifically designed to display video, handling scaling and color information for viewing various HD and SD frame rates and sizes accurately. Most other LCD displays are made to with computers in mind only, so it's refreshing to see a manufacturer designing products with video editing specifically in mind. [image:blog_post:14084]We ended the tour with a walk through of the assembly area and warehouse. As the tour was progressing, I looked around at the multiple petabytes of storage lining the shelves, and I wondered at all the video and photo data that would eventually end up on these drives. I also wondered how many hours of irreplaceable footage in the future would be lost forever due to poor data management, or even hard drive failure. LaCie, of course is a big proponent of back-ups (preferably using another LaCie drive), and it is a necessity in todays digital acquisition environment, where tape is starting to fade away. What I think the video production community really needs though, is a digital equivalent of the shoe-box full of tapes in the closet. A product between the multi-million dollar content management servers of major studios, and more robust than simply another hard drive. An affordable digital server that's not just for storage, but for archiving as well.
