 Welcome to the Crimson Engine. My name is Rebedium. Today we are going to talk about everything you could ever want to know about storage, storage options, and finding the right storage system for filmmakers. So basically you have a couple of factors to take into account when you're looking for storage for filmmaking. First is capacity. The second is price. The third is redundancy and how safe that hard drive is. Will it allow one drive to fail and keep all your data? Will it allow two drives to fail? The fourth is speed. How quickly can you access your files? Is it quick enough to edit from? Is it quick enough to get other things from? And upgradeability. Can you take the drives in the system that you have, put them in a different system, or upgrade the existing system as your business or your file storage needs grow? So I have a range of different drives here in front of me. Well, I guess you could say storage systems because some of them have one drive, some of them have several drives. I'm just going to talk about each kind of class of storage and who it's for, how it works, and how you can use it. So let's start with these very small portable hard drives. They contain one solid state drive. This one's from GTek. It is really fast. I'm talking over a thousand megabits per second. Pretty much as fast as the solid state drive that's in your computer if you connect it through Thunderbolt 3. The downside is for the size it's expensive. This one's only one terabyte. I think it's close to like six or seven hundred dollars. It only has one input, so you can only connect it to one computer at a time. And shooting on something like the Canon C200, which fills up about 500 gigs per hour of raw footage, this is only going to get you two hours transporting files or using this as an expansion to your internal hard drive on your computer. It's great. Now we'll move on to multiple drive systems. So this is the Lassie 2 Big RAID. It has space for two drives inside. You can either have it as J-Bob, just a bunch of disks. You can have it as RAID 0, where both disks form one giant drive, or you can have it as RAID 1, where both drives are copies of each other. Should one drive fail, you get the backup on the other one. So this is great when you're just starting out. You want something that's directly attached to your computer. You're only one person working alone. The body itself is maybe two or three hundred dollars. Then you have to pay for the disks inside. And that's true for all of these, except maybe this one. So there's a cost for the system, the enclosure, and then there's a cost for the storage you put inside it. The downside of this is that you lose half of your storage. So if you put two eight terabyte drives in here, you only get eight terabytes of storage because you get redundancy. They're basically mirror images of one another. Should one fail, it can be rebuilt from the copy of the other drive. This is direct attached storage so it connects straight to your computer again through Thunderbolt 3. So it's not going to appear on your network. You're not going to get access to it anywhere else. But it is a cheap way of starting out with some redundancy and some external storage. Now the speed you're going to get on this is around 250, 300 megabytes per second, because that's the limit of the single drive inside. The spinning disks can only go that fast. Step up from this is the biggest of the dash or direct attached storage, something like the Drobo 5D here. Now you can take, put up to five drives in this guy. It has two Thunderbolt 3 ports on the back. So you can daisy chain this to another drive. And it is high capacity. But again, it's limited to that same speed of the spinning disks inside, except for the SSD component. Lastly, we come to the Synology. This is the DS1618 Plus. You can put six drives in here. But this is a whole different class of drive. It does not have Thunderbolt 3. It has Ethernet ports on the back. You connect this to your router and it appears as a drive on your network. That means everyone on the network can access the files on this drive. That means if you've shot something, your editor can start working with it straight away or someone else can be doing the graphics and pulling thumbnails from the files that you've shot, someone else can be uploading other files. And it also has room for solid state drives in the bottom that will give you quicker cache access. The downside of network attached storage is that it's slow. Direct attached storage on Thunderbolt 3, you're going to get 250 to 300 megabytes per second. On a network attached storage, you have the ability to connect multiple computers to the one drive, but that speed drops to about 100 megabytes per second, which unfortunately isn't fast enough to transfer raw 4K footage from the C200 until now. This drive comes with expansion slot. What I did was install a 10 gigabit Ethernet card into this expansion slot and connected that directly to the computer with CAT 6 cable. Now this guy goes all the way up even faster than the direct attached storage, which is insane. Not only do you have the added capacity of a network drive, not only do you have the flexibility to put it on the other side of your office because this guy is fine. The larger direct attached storage drives can be really loud. I don't want them right next to my computer. This can be in another room or in a cupboard down the hall. As long as you can run CAT 6 cable to it, you can get those same super, super fast speeds, high capacity in your network attached storage. Why I went with the Synology and I feel like this may be the last drive I'll ever own or a drive like it. This ticks all of those boxes. With six drives, it has a huge capacity. You can upgrade those drives sequentially, so you can fill this whole thing with 14 terabyte drives. And then when the 20 terabyte drives come available, you can slowly swap out the drives in here for 20 terabytes and get more capacity that way. Connected via 10 gigabit ethernet, this thing is the fastest drive here except for the solid state. And with RAID 5, this has the most redundancy. So any of these drives can fail and we still have a complete backup of all your data. And when you get to these larger drives, there are less drives and more really PCs with hard drives in them. Both of these guys, and to a lesser extent, the Leci, have CPUs in them and they run their own software. They do their own thing. By far the most complete version of that is in the Synology. I mean, this thing has its own operating system that you access and you can install apps on it. Because this is a network attached storage, you can log into this drive with a password and get access to the files on it anywhere that you have the internet. So if I was in a remote village in Nepal and really, really needed a photo or a document from four years ago and I've got it all stored on my Synology, I can just log in, find that file and download it in Nepal. That for me is game changing. I used to have a system where I had smaller direct attached storage drives that were my work drives and then as I finished projects, I moved them over to a network attached storage or to disconnected storage that I keep in my closet. But that meant when you lost a file or needed something and I often need that when I'm making sort of like best of compilations of my show reel. I had to search through literally dozens of old hard drives because this thing has such high capacity. I can just keep all my old projects on this access them anywhere at any time via the network at really high speeds and you're good to go. I understand everyone out there isn't ready to make this kind of investment but Synology actually do have smaller drives. They have two and three and four bay drives that run a similar software. So you can start at that price point, use a network to that storage at a slower speeds and then once you're ready and you're working with multiple people like I do here, upgrade to the DS1618 plus that has the 10 gigabit ethernet capability as an option and then go up from there. I've been using this for about a month. It is a little bit of a learning curve to kind of set it up, understand how it works. But there's a heap of information out there. Synology have been super helpful and responsive to questions I've asked them. There's also a big user base on the internet and lots of questions I got answered on YouTube videos. I think this is the future for me, definitely a Synology system connected via 10 gigabit ethernet that gives me access to it anywhere on the network at really fast speeds and anywhere in the world that I could need it. So that's my look at the general lay of the land in 2019 as far as external storage goes. As we shoot more films in less compressed, more flexible, higher bit rates, raw 4k, 8k, as just around the corner, we are going to need to store a whole bunch more stuff. And I think now is the time to kind of get your storage solution sorted so that as you're shooting more stuff, you can be confident that it's stored securely. You can get access to it and you have redundancy. I'm going to do another video in the coming weeks about sort of the ins and outs of the Synology, how to set it up with 10 gigabit ethernet. If you don't have that installed on your computer, you can actually get these $100 little dongle boxes that convert a Thunderbolt 3 port into a 10 gigabit ethernet port and generally how you make all of this work. Thanks very much for watching. I will see you next time.