Results tagged “storage” from CLICK

Robin Harris of ZDNet's Storage Bits blog always has excellent advice on backups and the best ways to do them. Here he is with How to archive on disk drives, which explains why putting something on a hard drive and then powering it off for extended periods of time isn't such a great idea:

The reason: the bits on the hard drive will gradually lose their magnetism, sometimes in as little as 12 months. Disks automatically rewrite marginal data blocks on the fly.

That doesn't happen when the disk is powered off.

I didn't think tape had a chance, but right now, digital videotape -- especially a form of it called LTO, or linear tape-open -- is a superior medium for archiving high-grade digital video, says an expert at Woodland Hills-based Panavision, a maker of high-grade camera systems for the movie and TV industry.

John Galt, senior vice president of the Advanced Digital Imaging Group at Panavision, in a conversation with MTI Film CEO Larry Chernoff at last year's HD Expo in Burbank, recently posted by Panavision, said that hard drives just aren't up to the task.

"Conceptually, if we look at recording media reliability, I think at the bottom of the reliability heap I would put disk drives. ... They fail more often than the manufacturers would like us to believe; however, with appropriate application of striping or RAID-type arrays, often you can recover. Many facilities use large disk arrarys for the post process ... but they do have backup because things do fail."

According to Panavision's Web site, the company's equipment has been used on scores of productions, including (and I do realize this list could use an update) motion pictures "Master and Commander," "Seabiscuit," "The Last Samurai," "Mystic River," and "Cold Mountain," along with TV shows "Everybody Loves Raymond," "CSI" and "24."

Chertoff, of MTI Film -- which specializes in software for post-production work in a digital environment, says that magnetic hard drives have their place in film production -- but they can't stand alone.

"To have a complete hard drive environment and to administrate that hard drive environment ... I'd rather shoot myself. But the idea of using hard drive technology is absolutely important for online access. ... For near line access, whether it's videotape or LTO, or whatever tape format you wish, that's an inexpensive, accessible way of archiving your material until you need to bring it online.

LTO -- linear tape-open -- currently has a capacity of 800 GB per tape and transfers data at 120 MB per second, according to Wikipedia. Future renditions of LTO are expected to double that capacity and then double it again.

Both Galt and Chernoff agree that dailies are a particular problem in digital production.

"The idea of seeing high-quality dailies in a timely manner ... is extremely important," Galt said. "It was something that used to happen when we shot film and looked at print dailies. And now it's completely gone. ... We need to reconsider how we do production and post-production. ... Sometimes problems exist that are not seen in a cursory viewing of highly compressed low-definition images."

And while digital filmmaking is one of the leading examples of a task that produces a whole lot of data that has to be processed, stored and archived very quickly, almost any task that relies on large amounts of constantly changing data needs to make sure that their storage and archiving situation is as ready for anything as it can be.

(Author's note: I'd watch the video myself, but since it requires the QuickTime plugin, and since QuickTime is one of the worst applications to run on Windows that I've ever seen, I'll be content to a) read the PDF transcript and b) watch it on a Mac, where QuickTime runs great.)