In the Press
Media storage is the one component of your system that you want to set and forget. Most of us take our local drives and network volumes for granted. We expect them to just work. When they don’t, we quickly become aware that there’s a problem as work grinds to a halt. Having fast and reliable media storage is the cornerstone of modern editing, graphics, animation and color correction. For a lot of us, videotape masters and deliverables are long a thing of the past, so a successful storage strategy is integral to staying in business.
Technology Pillars
Storage technology has advanced over the years, with drives gaining capacity and speed and entirely new storage mechanisms being developed. There are four pillars to consider: solid-state storage, RAIDs, interconnection and shared storage.
Echoing the evolutionary trends of other digital technologies, SSD (solid-state drive) storage devices have been gaining capacity while coming down in price. These days it’s quite common to have computers—especially laptops—with internal SSDs. As this trend progresses, the same will become true of local external drives. The majority of editors today are using spinning disk drives for local storage, but that’s changing as editors are called on to deal with higher resolutions and frame rates.
If you want the best performance with high capacity, then RAID (redundant array of independent disks) is the way to go. Once expensive and exotic, there are plenty of configurations available today, ranging from a chassis with two drives up to eight and more. Promise Technology, CalDigit, LaCie, G-Technology and OWC are leading RAID storage vendors.