New 8TB drives and failure stats

There have been a few threads recently about expanding storage/external drives, etc so I thought this might be of interest.

Seagate has released an 8TB drive which sells bare for just $260!

http://www.engadget.com/2014/12/12/seagate-ships-8tb-shingled-hard-drive/

That's a huge amount of capacity for a very reasonable price. As an internal drive or in an external enclosure with your choice of interface, this makes for a very affordable option for storing large amounts of footage. With read speeds of 150MB/s it should be fine for anything other than editing raw directly.

I also recently came across Backblaze's drive reliability reports - Backblaze is a cloud backup service so they go through a ton of drives and they've been reporting on failure rates on their blog:

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update-september-2014/

Unfortunately Seagate comes out worst in the rankings, followed by Western Digital, with Hitachi coming in with the highest reliability. The numbers vary quite a bit depending on the specific drive though - for instance, Seagate's 4TB drives do much better than their smaller drives. Hard to know where the 8TB drives will end up at this point.
 
Saw this the other day. They're slow-ish.. but for the size and price there's certainly nothing to complain about. I wouldn't trust this setup for long-term use, but you could throw 4 of 'em in a raid 0 configuration and you'd likely hit, or at least approach, ssd speeds. It'd be like having a 32TB SSD. Which is roughly the amount of space needed for a 2hr feature shot in 4k raw at a 10:1 shooting ratio. :D
 
Saw this the other day. They're slow-ish.. but for the size and price there's certainly nothing to complain about. I wouldn't trust this setup for long-term use, but you could throw 4 of 'em in a raid 0 configuration and you'd likely hit, or at least approach, ssd speeds. It'd be like having a 32TB SSD. Which is roughly the amount of space needed for a 2hr feature shot in 4k raw at a 10:1 shooting ratio. :D

How do you get to that number? I used to work at a post house (not as a data manager so I could be wrong), and I never saw any 4k movie exceed 12 TB. Max I ever saw was 55mb per frame, which at 24 fps totals to 9.5 TB for a 2h movie.

On topic though: seagate advertises them as archive disks, most useful for cold storage (storing stuff you don't really need to actively use).
 
You missed the part about the 10:1 shooting ratio - so that's 20 hours of raw source files, or nearly 100TB if we go with your 55mb/frame number.

But realistically you're probably not going to edit directly from raw. Even as archive disks these could be useful as an affordable place to store your raw footage if used in a raid 1 or 5 configuration.
 
My 4k camera averages about 12MB/frame when shooting raw. at 24fps x 120min x 10 (10:1 ratio) yeah, I need thirty some odd terabytes to store all of that footage.

Likely would want a bit more for proxies, edit scratch, renders, etc too.. but this price point makes it achievable at a much more reasonable cost.


Anyway, I will probably look into getting a couple for use as dump drives on set/location at some point. Once their reliability can be ascertained anyway.
 
I upgraded one of the drives in my laptop a few months back, but started having issues with it - noise, slowdowns, unmounting itself, etc. Just got a new one, cloned everything over except for about a dozen files that were corrupted due to bad sectors (had them backed up so nothing lost fortunately) and swapped it in... just realized the old one that failed is a HGST/Hitachi drive, the most reliable by far in the backblaze stats!

Just goes to show that any drive can fail - make sure you have backups! I'm actually considering giving backblaze a try because although I do maintain redundant backups of just about everything important, it's all on physical drives here at my house so there's still a risk of losing data to fire, etc. Unfortunately I have a feeling it's going to take months to back everything up to the cloud, but once it's done it's more likely to be up to date than if I went with a manual offsite backup routine.
 
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