Roundup: 9 New Video Storage Products

Finding the right storage device for the type of work you need one for is incredibly important. Just looking for the fastest or the biggest is a way to look, but you might be selling your needs short in the end if all factors aren't considered. Furthermore, going with the first device you like or even see might keep you from finding something better. In these cases a comprehensive list of new equipment is an excellent place to look or to start your search. Each media professional or student in need of a storage device are different, so the storage device they use for their application should be different as well. Julian Mitchell from Definition Magazine put together a list of nine "newish" storage products. Users might have a knee-jerk reaction to this and think anything that's not the newest device isn't worth looking into but financially finding something that's older might be just as good at a reduced price. Like I said before, all factors should be taken into account, and you have to work within your budget. One thing however to make note of is the use of Thunderbolt 3 with most of these devices. The industry seems to be flexing to Thunderbolt 3 due to it's speed so any device with that option will work well with today's standards no matter when it came out.

AKITIO Thunder 3 QUAD MINI

The Thunder 3 Quad Mini is unsurprisingly a smallish 4-bay storage enclosure designed to house up to four 2.5-inch drives. With Software RAID, four striped SSDs can reach data transfer speeds of up to 1375 MB per second while the Thunderbolt 3 interface provides sufficient bandwidth for additional 4K video signal streams and data transfers at the same time.

CODEX M SERIES FLEXI DRIVE

The main part of the system are these Codex Flexi Drives, which are a high-capacity, secure, transportable storage solution. Each Flexi Drive has a capacity of 24 TB and quad data redundancy protection. Typical LTO file access in a tape robot is 1-4 minutes but with a Codex Flexi Drive it is only 0.008 seconds.

GTECH G-RAID THUNDERBOLT 3

G-RAID, it even sounds cool when you say it. At its base headline, the G-RAID with Thunderbolt 3 is a high-performance, dual Enterprise-class 7200RPM hard drive storage system featuring Thunderbolt 3. This is for serious users, the word Enterprise is the giveaway. You can also use it across Mac and Windows computers via a re-format for Win.

LACIE 6/12 big

Thunderbolt originally combined a DisplayPort with the serial data that plug-in PCIe cards use to communicate with the host computer. Basically, it’s a way of externalising the signals that internal PCIe cards have used for the last decade or so. Unfortunately, internal cards get to access several of these serial data streams, making them very fast, so Thunderbolt has had some catching up to do. Thunderbolt 3 essentially combines four PCIe 3.0 channels, DisplayPort 1.2, HDMI 2.0 and USB 3.1 gen 2 into a single connector. It can shift data at twice the rate of Thunderbolt 2 – 40Gbit/s. It can also supply up to 100W of power to the external device.

LACIE 2BIG DOCK

LaCie 2big Dock features Seagate IronWolf Pro drives and RAID optimisation for power management and reliability. And if all that isn't enough there's a five year limited warranty included on your system.

LEXAR 512GB CFast Card

We tested the Lexar in Blackmagic’s URSA Mini – well known for being cruel to CFast cards. It easily handled the data rates for 4.6k Lossless RAW up to 30 frames-per-second – for frame rates above that you need to use Dual Card mode (as you do with all CFast cards). Once the data is compressed – Raw, ProRes (or DNxHR when it comes) – you’re good to go at all frame rates with a single card. With the CODEX adapter in ARRI’s ALEXA XT, and the AMIRA, this card supports ProRes 4444 up to 120fps (3.2k).

OWC DOCK THUNDERBOLT 3

Getting down and dirty with the ports available; on the front of the device you've only the three ports available, a SD card reader, expanded analog audio in/out to connect speakers and microphones and a USB 3.1 port which will give you 5Gb/s data speed as well as power to your devices. Turning her over and you have; 4X USB 3.1 ports, a S/PDIF digital audio interface, blast from the past FireWire 800 for your old devices, gigabit Ethernet, Dual Thunderbolt 3 ports and a mini Display port.

SAMSUNG 2TB SSD T3 SSD

In this series we’ve looked at the way SSD media has been so popular that even camera owners whose primary recording media isn’t SSD have found a way of using them via adapters. There is also a large and growing number of shooters who have circumvented camera manufacturers who don’t have SSD bays in their cameras by using SSD-based monitor/recorders.

QUANTUM stornext 6

There is a high level of automation involved and even articial intelligence which is part of their StorNext 6 product. The data management can optimise capacity through automated storage tiering. This means reducing the need for costly primary storage. Files can be automatically and transparently moved from flash, to tape, object storage or the cloud — all while optimising performance and maintaining high availability.

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