When you’re choosing storage, you have what seems like a million options. It’s always tempting to narrow your choice down to speed, capacity and price. But there’s much more to it than that.

For near-line storage (where you need to be able to access your material quickly but don’t need to run multiple streams of 4K uncompressed for example) then you could choose slower drives and more of them. Conversely, if you need maximum performance for just the material you’re working on at the time, then get the fastest drives you can afford.

But what about portability? When you add that into the equation, your choice is more limited. Especially since these days you’re likely to want tens of terabytes actually on set. (Why? Because 4K and 8K raw workflows involve stupendously large files.)

Almost imperceptibly we now talk in terms of terabytes in the same way as we referred to gigabytes only a few years ago. That’s a thousand-fold increase. But it’s not surprising. 4K and 8K data rates are astonishing, and while you can work with proxies upstream in your workflow, there’s no alternative on-set to capturing and transferring raw files. ..[continue reading]