Hard Drives
Thunderbolt Storage Makes Some Noise
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Last year’s NAB, Thunderbolt was just announced so there were hardly any real products. This year, every major disk manufacturer released Thunderbolt drives.
LaCie has several different disk offerings with Thunderbolt connectivity. The Little Big Disk comes in sizes from 240GB to 2TB and features dual Thunderbolt ports for easy connectivity. The 2Big model provides RAID flexibity with sizes from 4TB to 8TB and can hot swap drives. They also showed a eSATA hub to allow you to connect eSATA drives at full speed via the Thunderbolt interface.
Western Digital was showing their Thunderbolt Duo dual drive storage system. The system allows you to configure the the disk in RAID format to mirror the drives for data protection or use them as two individual drives for more storage. The case allows you to swap out and replace drives.
Hitachi (which is a Western Digital Company) was showing off their G-RAID G-Technology drives with Thunderbolt. These drives feature RAID 0 with up to 8TB of storage and a 3 year warranty.
Workgroup Shared Media Storage
0I was on the lookout for some possibilities for shared storage for the MPS to help avoid the problem of patrons being locked to the workstation where they transferred their footage.
I found an interesting and affordable solution from Synology. This was one of those small booths where a company that had been making NAS software for years, decided to sell hardware as well to sell a package. It seemed well designed and flexible, supporting all types of drives (which are not included). There are two ethernet jacks which can be used together and at under $800 for the chassis, could be a good solution for local shared storage.
I also spoke with the folks at QNAP about their small NAS such as the TS-1079 Pro which sells for around $2700 and features NAS and iSCSI, policy based IP blocking (to limit access to ust the labs, SSL and shared folder management.
Wireless Storage for iPad
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G|Connect provides wireless storage for the iPad and can stream up to 5 SD or 3 HD video streams to 5 or more users. It has built in WiFI internet access and can be password protected. A 500GB version sells for less than $200.