So my first official post is about hard drives. I hate hard drives. I don’t really consider them a proper piece of technology, they’re more like ticking time bombs. All we can do is pray for the best and take the necessary precautions to make sure our data is safe.

I suppose I’ll start with my thoughts on hard drive manufacturers and types. Not all drives are created equal, and not all manufacturers are created equal either. I am preferential to G-Tech, Western Digital and Seagate, personally. G-Tech is slightly more professional, while WD and Seagate are consumer-level drives. If you’ve got the money, Caldigit makes a fantastic drive, too. If you’ve ever had a discussion with someone about drives, you’ll find that everyone has their own opinions about which drives to trust and which to not. A lot of it is personal preference, or rather, it’s about which drives you’ve been lucky enough to not have fail on you. I recently had a terrible experience with LaCie, where not only did the drive fail within 6 months of purchase, but my efforts to get a replacement were met with a horribly frustrating experience with technical support. I’ve heard other people complain about drive controllers fail on their Western Digital drives, but I’ve had fantastic luck with their hardware. Like I said, personal preference. However, my one carved-in-stone rule is that you absolutely should never buy a hard drive from a manufacturer you’ve never heard of. Not failsafe, but it’s a good general rule.

There are two general categories of hard drives–solid state drives and traditional hard disk drives. The latter is what you’ll find in most modern computers and external hard drives. They’re cheap and easy to data manage and offer enormous quantities of storage space. The former is much newer, significantly faster and considerably more expensive. (You should know that SSD’s also have some compatibility issues with Mac OS X, but it’s pretty technical and I won’t go too much into that. Just something to be aware of.) Point being that SSD’s are definitely the future, but mass adoption has been slow. Think of a standard SD flash memory card in your digital camera, and multiply that by 10, and that’s basically the idea behind a Solid State Drive. From a professional filmmaking perspective, like the one I hail from, I recommend sticking with HDD’s for data backup and SSD’s (if you can afford them) for running your operating system. That way, your computer will be extremely fast on the system level, but you’ll have the cost benefits of HDD’s.

For crucial data, you need to think about redundancy–a Redundant Array of Independent (or Inexpensive) Disks, or RAID. There are different RAID levels, each describing the level of redundancy in your data. Essentially, the more redundancy, the safer your data is. Here are some of the basic RAID levels. There are many more, but these are the ones you will most likely encounter:

RAID 0: No actual redundancy. Two drives are “striped” together, creating one continuous volume. For example, two 500GB hard drives are striped together in a RAID 0 array to make a single 1TB disk. This is best for when you need an exceptionally fast disk, because you have two hard drive needles reading and writing your data. If one drive fails, you may lose all of your data.
RAID 1: Perfect redundancy. Two drives that are mirrored, so they are perfect duplicates of each other. No speed benefits, but instead just a perfect copy of all your data. Probably the safest way to store important media. Even though you would have two 500GB drives, your total disk space would still be 500GB, not 1TB. This is because you aren’t combining the available space from both drives, but instead you just have one drive that’s an exact copy of the other.
RAID 5: My favorite. This is a combination of RAID 0 and 1 with a minimum of 3 drives in the array. Two of the drives are essentially striped together, while the third contains parity data. This means that while the data is spanned across the two primary drives, the third keeps a record of how all the data fits together, so if a drive fails, you can rebuild all the data. The advantage here is that instead of losing half of your total hard drive space like in RAID 1, you only lose a third of your space (in a 3-drive array), plus get some of the speed advantages of RAID 1. If a drive fails, you won’t lose any data, but if a second drive fails before the first is rebuilt, then you can lose your data.

The last major piece of the puzzle is your interface, i.e. USB, FireWire, or eSATA. USB is by far the most common and slowest, and is found almost universally on all drives. It is the lowest common denominator, the one common element on most hardware. FireWire 400 and 800 are relatively common, especially on drives designed for media storage. It is faster and more reliable than USB and allows the drive and the computer to communicate back and forth simultaneously, unlike USB. eSATA is becoming more popular, and is theoretically over three times as fast as FireWire 800. Crazy fast. Each interface has its own benefits and uses: USB is great for documents and small photos, things like that. It can be connected to basically any computer anywhere. FireWire is found on almost any Mac, though hardly any Windows PC’s, and is relatively fast while still being inexpensive. eSATA is still waiting to become widely accepted, but it’s on the right track. (Another interface, Serial-Attached-SCSI, or SAS, is the fastest connection commonly available, twice as fast as eSATA. It is reserved for professional high-speed setups and comes with an equally professional price tag. SAS will probably stay in that portion of the market, and for the average consumer, won’t affect your purchase in the next few years unless you’re a professional video editor looking at a Caldigit hard drive system.) My recommendation: purchase a drive with as many connectors as you can get. FireWire 800 is a necessity, and eSATA is highly recommended for upgradability. Most drives also include USB, which is good to have “just in case.” And now that USB 3.0 is coming out, you’ll have some future-proofing there if you can find one that supports that new version.

That pretty much sums up my overview on hard drives. I could write volumes (no pun intended) about all the intricacies of hard drives, but this is long enough as is and will hopefully at least provide a starting point for anyone looking to invest in digital storage. As a filmmaker and photographer, preserving my data is of utmost importance. It’s critical to either back up your data to multiple drives or invest the money in a quality drive. If there’s anything I missed or anything anyone would like to learn more about, let me know and perhaps I’ll do a second edition of this hard drive post.