It's Cheaper by the Gigabyte.
It's hard to believe that today's large capacity hard drives can cost about 1 dollar per Gigabyte of storage. Still, that's a good thing. With Uncompressed Video weighing in at about 1.8 Gig PER MINUTE, finishing long form programs will require large amounts of storage space indeed. Still, DV users have it a little bit better, with 1 Hour of DV weighing in at around 18 GB.
No matter what your storage needs, just like RAM, you can never have too
much. Just when you think you've got enough, your client asks you to keep
that 2 hour training video on your hard drive for a month or 2...
It's cheap, no doubt, but the standards can be confusing. Let's take a
look at what's holding our data now a days.
ATA/ IDE Drives - The most common drive and interface in
existence, the ATA/IDE Drive has proven itself with not only reliability but
with a very low cost of entry. The fastest models are fine for a few
layers of DV work. If you require many layers of DV effects, take a look
at an ATA RAID level 0 Solution.
SATA Drives - A Newer Development in the Non-SCSI workstation world,
SATA drive are quickly becoming commonplace in new workstation, game computer
and High-End Multimedia computer. They have several advantages over ATA.
The first is their Upper Transfer Limit. They can theoretically transfer
150MB per second. Your like to NOT get even half that transfer rate with a
single drive, but, if you were to stripe 4 together into a RAID... Hmmmm....
The second advantage is there interface cables. Their small, easy to use,
and they foster improved airflow in most current case designs. At the
moment, SATA are about 15% more expensive than their ATA counterparts
SCSI - The old workhorse and industry standard for Mission Critical
applications and Real-Time uncompressed performance. Expensive, Hot, and
difficult to administer, SCSI drives squarely belong in the realm of the
High-End Workstation. If you need multiple streams of Uncompressed Video
or High-Definition Video, SCSI is really the only way to go.
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If
your Avid Xpress Pro Manual looks like a dog eared, sticky noted, coffee-stained
mess, be sure to check out our review of the excellent new Training DVD's by
Like A Pro.
