Which Hard Drives?

You are about to get an editing system built that will serve you for the next millennium and the 1 million dollar question is...

Factoids

Fact: Hard drives fail on the average of 2 out every 100, in the first 3 years of service.  In our experience, IDE (ATA) drives fail more frequently than SCSI. Fact: Very few editors backup their media files Fact: It takes days to weeks to forever to recapture and rebuild your editing project in case of a fatal drive failure.  (Unless you had a backup or used batch capture.) Helpful Links: • How to prevent data loss before it happens • How to recover data from a failed drive

Which hard drives?

• IDE or SCSI?
• External or internal
• or FireWire?
• or Fibre Channel?

Let's begin with the eternal: IDE or SCSI?

(No time?  See the Summary.)

The myth: IDE drives are very cheap and are as fast as SCSI.  The facts: indeed, inexpensive: 2-3 times less money than SCSI models of the same capacity.  Fast, too: current models offer over 40MB/s transfer rates, but not as fast as SCSI (up to 70MB/s).  Where IDE drives really suffer is expandability, both inside and outside of the computer box.  Here is a short table showing the differences:

We will cover FireWire and Fibre-Channel hard disks in the next release of this article.  Let's consider the IDE and SCSI based choices:

• Internal IDE drive or IDE arrays.  Most value for the money.
• External SCSI arrays based on IDE drives (Medea or Huge Systems' boxes): benefits of SCSI combined with low prices of IDE drives.
• Internal SCSI arrays.  Use when the above choices are not fast enough or when reliability is more important than money.
• External SCSI arrays.  The fastest, the most expandable, easiest to service.  More expensive as well.

How important are your hard drives?  Right after the choice of your video editing software and hardware.  The choices usually go like this:

1. Video Editing Software (Adobe Premiere, Incite Editor, Speed Razor, etc.)
2. Video Editing Platform (Canopus DVStorm, Pinnacle DV500 and Pro-ONE, Matrox RT2500, etc.)
3. Video Storage (Internal ATA, SCSI, external Medea box, etc.)
4. The computer system adequate for all of the above and whatever other things you want it to do
5. Additional software and hardware to suit your needs (DVD burner, authoring software, compositing software, etc.)
6. Important Accessories: display and video monitors, keyboard, mouse, speakers, audio mixers, break-out boxes, etc.
7. Support, services, warranties to go with all of the above.

As you see, video storage is considered very important and here is why:

Hard drives fail most often, and the consequences are the most devastating.

Hard drives fail more often than any other computer components.  You can replace any other failed component in your system and get back up and running again, fast.  Not so with hard drives.  If your system drive fails, here is the likely scenario: replace the drive, reinstall OS, reinstall applications (or use a "restore CD" supplied with some systems), restore your documents, media, projects, mail store, contacts...  It's a time-consuming, nerve-wrecking and daunting task.  Oh wait, no backup?  Very few editors backup their media (video and audio) files, and understandably so.  It either takes huge amounts of space and time to do so, or it costs more than your annual car insurance (with the exception of certain exotics).

The recourses are: prevention and recovery.

Summary.  Choose drives depending on how important speed, reliability, expandability and certain features are to you.  For most editing systems, ATA (IDE) drives are fine, and will save you a bunch of money over SCSI.  Yet there are circumstances where only SCSI (or FC-AL), or hybrid devices (Medéa) will do.

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How to prevent data loss?  The simplest method is to continuously backup your data: every day or as often as you do any major changes.  It can be extremely time and space consuming so for editors that have all their source media on tape, there is a much more practical and inexpensive (free) solution: batch capture. 

How to recover the data on a failed drive?  Data recovery service are usually very expensive and never 100% guaranteed.  Yes if you absolutely have to recover whatever was on that failed hard drives, here are the links to selected data recovery services:

• DataRecovery.net (TX)
• Data Recovery Service (NJ)
• Total Recall Data Recovery Services
• or, do a search on the web for "Data Recover Services"