What are you guys doing for storage?

[VenomXts]

I have a lot of content both digital media and drone videos (the bigger growth in needed space).

I am tired of having some split off to separate drives and looking at some options.

I could add a new bigger drive or go with a raid array NAS with multiple bigger drives.

Just wondering what you guys do.

What I got running now.

 

[Deleted member 103366]

I am curious,of that how much would you actually ever look at? No implications, just a honest question.

 

[Gagey52]

I use the LaCie 4 TB Rugged hard drive to keep my project files on. Only current projects are kept on my computer
Regards

 

[VenomXts]

I am curious,of that how much would you actually ever look at? No implications, just a honest question.

I have a large collection of Tv and Movies. And I can tell you, there have been prolonged internet outages where I was glad I had it... Streaming is great and we do a lot of it.. but if I am being honest I re-watch a lot of shows that makes up 20% as filler while I do other things.

As far as drone video, im getting to the point where I will delete some as I have saved everything and 4k 60fps is big lol.

Anything that is super important to me is up on one drive/drop box.

 

[Phantomrain.org]

I have a lot of content both digital media and drone videos (the bigger growth in needed space).

I am tired of having some split off to separate drives and looking at some options.

I could add a new bigger drive or go with a raid array NAS with multiple bigger drives.

Just wondering what you guys do.

What I got running now.


View attachment 136561

This does not look cost effective. I would see how you like working with Google Drive : $1.99 month for 100 Gigs and you can buy as you need Or 2 TB for $100 year.


Phantomrain.org
Gear to fly in the Rain and Land on the Water.

 

[VenomXts]

This does not look cost effective. I would see how you like working with Google Drive : $1.99 month for 100 Gigs and you can buy as you need Or 2 TB for $100 year.
View attachment 136576

Phantomrain.org
Gear to fly in the Rain and Land on the Water.

I should of clarified, local storage vs cloud is how I have things set up.

I take so much of my footage that I don't expect to have cloud back up for everything.

 

[NOLADG]

Personally, I have purchased several NVME drives and place them in an enclosure and swap between them to have complete working setups for my computer as a lot of 4k videos would eat up my small space built into my computer. Using a Thunderbolt connection, the external NVME is almost as fast as the one in my computer. Out of what I have, the Fledging Thunderbolt Shell is my fastest and most favorite enclosure. I did a video some time ago comparing my enclosures:

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This is more for working files, ie items I am making videos of. For archival storage, the speed is not needed and a good old hard drive works fine.

FYI, I am not connected to any products nor make money off my Youtube videos.

 

[GDadd]

I use Highpoint Tech SAS arrays on my systems with dedicated PCI-e cards. They also make Thunderbolt solutions, but prefer the card because it handles all of the RAID management and performance.

The performance is outstanding, even in a RAID 5 config. I also use a series of Synology NAS devices, which are great for storage, but can feel a bit laggy if you are spending lots of time editing 4k video. But even this can be somewhat mitigated a number of ways, including local cache/RAM, a 10g home network, or by editing in lower res/outputting in 4k. Much depends on your workflow.

Overall, the NAS tends to be much simpler, reliable, and not prone to PC/Mac configs which can go sideways.

Regardless, a drive array solution vs single drives is going to offer better performance and flexibility, with added peace of mind. Seems like a logical next step for you after managing all of those single drives.

 

[Dave Maine]

The answer really depends on how much shooting you are likely to do, and in what format. I do a moderate amount of 4K 30 FPS video production, and have about 40TB of disc spinning for both raw footage and video project storage.

 

[BrokenAero]

In 2018 I bought a 10TB WD EasyStore USB 3.0 for $179,99 ($18/TB)
Western Digital no longer offers the 10TB drive but Best Buy’s current WD EasyStore deals are::

8TB for $169.99 ($21.25/TB)
14TB for $269.99 ($19.29/TB)

 

[NOLADG]

Regardless, a drive array solution vs single drives is going to offer better performance and flexibility, with added peace of mind. Seems like a logical next step for you after managing all of those single drives.

Thanks for the input. I do have one 12G NAS on my system, but with hard drives and a 1g network, so it is not fast. The advantage of my enclosures is: they are like using different computers with different operating systems and/or programs installed.

But in the future, I may upgrade to the Highpoint Tech as their products look amazing.

 

[MavicAir2Marc]

I have a 10TB drive from Western Digital which was pretty reasonable, I also have a 4 drive NAS with (Crucial or WD) SSD drives that give me 8TB in a Raid 1 (or maybe it's 0, I can never remember which) one drive as a backup. The NAS is on ethernet (as are all my computers except a laptop that I drag along everywhere) and the 10TB (not an SSD but good enough for storage) is just on my 2010 iMac Pro (to which I have replaced the original drive with a 1TB SSD). The WD drive was about $175 I believe and I got lucky on the NAS. My good friend had an extra enclosure with 4 drives that he wasn't using and gave it to me. The drives I think are around $200 (or were...storage is getting cheaper all the time) a piece. I have not even dented storage yet despite the fact everything is backed up on both storage devices. There are some deals out there for storage if you look around and can configure them. I do tend to stick with certain brands for reliability reasons.

Edit: Just looked under my Synology online account...it's a RAID 5 setup so if one drive goes bad, my data is still intact. Otherwise it would be a 12TB NAS. Memory...it ain't just for computers

 

[tlswift58]

I have a lot of content both digital media and drone videos (the bigger growth in needed space).

I am tired of having some split off to separate drives and looking at some options.

I could add a new bigger drive or go with a raid array NAS with multiple bigger drives.

Just wondering what you guys do.

What I got running now.


View attachment 136561

Western Digital has come out with some larger TB drive / units that are not all that bad. A "NAS" is not a bad thing, just have to have some large drives to begin with. I have a couple of 2 TB drives in a 2 drive dock and they are about half full. I copy files over to the 2nd drive as a backup plan. No drive has an infinite life, so plan that ahead when building out your setup or you'll be sorry when it does die.

Any drone pilot will have storage issues if they always shoot 4k or higher video, not to mention if you have RAW photo files. Nature of the beast.

 

[StantonZ]

I've solved most of my storage problem by only shooting (video) in HD--not 4k.
The rest of my storage problem was solved with a 6TB WD "My Drive".

 

[NOLADG]

Another suggestion is to go through your photos and videos to delete the bad ones and trim the videos to only contain the keeper portion of the video. Use a program that truly saves a new video file for the trimming as many programs just mark new starting and ending points and the file size does not change.

 

[EricJT]

Another suggestion is to go through your photos and videos to delete the bad ones and trim the videos to only contain the keeper portion of the video. Use a program that truly saves a new video file for the trimming as many programs just mark new starting and ending points and the file size does not change.

As storage capacity increased over the years, so did the digitization of traditional media...music,TV, movies, home video, photography. When drones came along, they added more video and photos to the storage mix.

I have found that as the price per GB/TB drops so does my tendancy to store more and more, not to mention the need for backups.

Covid resulted in many people doing early house spring cleaning....I need to do the same when it comes to my digital collections....an earlier poster suggested culling the videos and photos....sound advice.

In my case I suspect only 10% of my footage falls in the "keeper" category.

 

[66427cobra]

I'm a big fan of NAS. It makes your content available to all your devices. No plugging/unplugging USB drives.

A bigger question is how important is your content? If everything is on one big drive and it fails you could lose everything.

My Western Digital NAS is setup for RAID 10 with four 4TB drives. Yes, it halves storage but my content is protected if a drive fails.

I also built my own NAS using a $35 Raspberry Pi single-board computer. The great thing is the Linux based NAS software is free. I use Open Media Vault (OMV) but there are others out there. You have to know your way around computers and basic networking but there is plenty of documentation out there to walk you through the setup.

The best thing is all those USB drives I had laying around are now on my network. I can even plug in the SD card from my Mini 2 into the NAS using a USB adapter. Makes it easy to copy across the network.

 

[thispilothere]

I have a large collection of Tv and Movies. And I can tell you, there have been prolonged internet outages where I was glad I had it...

Me too. Fortunately, I got a few NAS units from my buddy who works IT for a company that does frequent, unnecessary upgrades. They work great but you can easily build your own system for cheap. I check slickdeals regularly for sales on drives.

 

[eEridani]

I'm using (for decades now) self built raids using consumer NAS drives. A server motherboard, XEON CPU, ECC RAM, Adaptec controllers, SATA disks on RAID 5 to keep the parity cost down. I'm running Windows Server, but Linux also works well.

At the moment I'm carrying 40TB in RAID 5 and 50 - that used to be a large, lol. With this drone video at 4k sucking up 250GB a trip, I'm looking at swapping some drives to make a 64TB or 128TB set. Also moved to a 10Gb/s LAN (semi-ouch) and I get about 400MB/s sustained throughput to the raids over the LAN using cheaper NAS rated SATA disks and four spindle sets writing backups.

 

[Jan Smith]

I use a Drobo 5D3, a "Beyond RAID" storage system that can hold up to 5 HDDs. It does system diagnostics and will report if a drive is beginning to fail. Then you can hot-swap a new drive in its place, and all your data are back and ready to go. My system has 4 14TB WD Gold drives and one 12TB drive, and comfortably holds all my video clips and much more.