Hard Drives 105: Brands
There are a lot of options out there as far as external hard drives are concerned but there are a couple of brands at the top of the heap which I would recommend.
Easily in the top 3 drives are G-Drive, Lacie and Western Digital. I personally would prefer the dependability of a G-Drive. I do have a cheap drive I purchased over 5 years ago before I became more knowledgeable on the subject through work. I can’t say I’ve had any problems, but I don’t really have much peace of mind when it comes to the media stored there. I use it mainly as a backup though, so even if it crashes, I won’t need data recovery because I have that information elsewhere.
That being said, you can get these drives now with 500GB – 3TB of space, which is pretty immense for relatively low prices. When I was in college in the year 2000 I had a drive that stored 20GBs and if I remember correctly it cost me about $190! Today that can buy a 2TB drive! That’s roughly 100 x the storage space. I also have Lacie and G-Drives at my office and they really seem to be holding up without any problems.
The question might arise, where to purchase these items and how to get them to me, the guy working on your job. That would generally be done via the internet. Find out how much space you’ll need. Generally I use the ProRes codec which gives you about 30GB/hr. So if you have a 2hr VHS and you want a file transfer, you’ll need 60GB or less to store it. You can have the drive shipped directly to Advanced Media and you can just make sure your name is on it so I know who it belongs to. I get drives every day and it’s important that they are properly labeled to avoid confusion. For more information feel free to contact us here.
