The Best Hard-Drive for A Modern Day Editor (Shreditor)
As a YouTube tutorial maker, I produce, shoot and edit all my productions. Premium Beat recently wrote an article calling this type of role, a “Shreditor.” As a shreditor, I wear lots of hats, which to some people may seem like a lot. But if you have the skills to get it done, it actually saves you time! It enables me to create a ton of awesome content quickly without having to relay information between different production roles. And with lots of content, this means lots of video footage, which means it’s very important for me to have a reliable and accessible local storage system in place. We are lucky today because today, external storage is rather cheap!
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I recently acquired the 4TB LaCie Rugged Raid Portable drive. It works well with my on-the-go lifestyle. I can I can keep existing project files on this drive and also continually add new projects while I’m travelling or meeting with clients.
I also have a dog, aka #PremierePup. He likes to sniff and explore. Accidents can happen. He has already knocked off my drive from my desk once, but luckily due to the drive’s shock-resistant rubber sleeve it can withstand falls up to 2 meters, which is about 6.6 feet. It also has a perfectly beautiful dust and water resistant rubber plug, designed by Neil Poulton, which fits perfectly into the Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 ports to protect it from environmental contamination. Again, #PremierePup likes to chew. I guess LaCie know this because they included an extra Neil Poulton plug just in case #PremierePup decided to destroy first one. Thanks, LaCie!
With the combination of the rubber plug with the shock-resistant rubber sleeve the drive has a IP54 rating for environmental resistance. I had no idea what IP54 meant, so I looked it up (isn’t the internet, amazing?) And it turns out that IP stands for “Ingress Protection” rating and the two digits that follow “IP” stand for the type of protection. The first digit is for “solids” and the second is for “liquids” protection. So how does IP54 do? Well, out of rank of 0 to 6, 5 is pretty good! A rating of “5” means that the drive is “Dust Protected” but not “Dust Tight.” This simply means that the “ingress of dust” is not entirely prevented as compared to a 6 which has no ingress of dust at all. As for water, there is a rank from 0 - 8. Rank number 4 means that it is protected from splashing water on the enclosure. If the water gets into the USB port, though, you may be in trouble.
Also, the Thunderbolt cord is a part of the drive. It actually fits within and wraps around perimeter of the drive, so you won’t lose it! It’s pretty genius. The Thunderbolt connection alone will power on the drive. It transfers data at a rate of 240 MB/S, pretty fast! But if you do not have a Thunderbolt port in your computer, it also come with a USB 3.0 cord and an AC wall power plug. Since LaCie knows we live in a global world, it comes with worldwide travel adaptor system. So you can be anywhere and power up your LaCie. I don’t think I’ll ever use the AC wall power plug, as I work from a laptop and I’m usually on the go. But it’s always good to have this option in case you do not have any Thunderbolt ports available on your computer interface.
Another reason I love this drive is because it has RAID.
What is RAID? It is an acronym which stands for “Redundant Array of Independent Disks.” This basically means that there are two disks within the drive working to improve storage capacity through the duplication of data (making it redundant). Why is this important? This means that the data will still be there even if the drive fails. There are many types of RAID, LaCie Rugged 4TB has “Raid 0” with two disks. Raid 0 is the fastest and highly recommended for small businesses that operate in a quick-turn around environment. In RAID 0, when the the LaCie Rugged transfers data to its disks it spreads out out as bits and pieces across the two disks. This strategy for transferring data, while faster, does not protect is from drive failure because each disk is not a mirror image of the other. You could still send your drive to a recovery center, but it will likely cost a lot of money to recover your data. Thus, you should back up, always. Let’s face it, drives fail, it happens. Be a smart editor, backup often. At least once a week (try and set a calendar reminder). I backup all my footage to DropBox. You can also use Google Drive or a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system. Just be sure to compare the plans that have the best offer for you as some plans can get pricey!
LaCie Desktop Manager comes with drive.
To help you manage your LaCie 4TB Rugged drive, LaCie provides you with a free LaCie Desktop Manager. This manager automatically turns on when you connect your LaCie to your computer. Through this manager you can set alerts and always check on the status of your LaCie. Is the temperature good? Is the RAID operational? If you are new to formatting your drive for your computer, you can also format and reformat the drive from within the desktop manager. You can partition the drive into two halves, one for MAC, one for PC or as MS-DOS (FAT) for use on both MAC or Windows systems.
LaCie makes it easy for me. And I hope it does for you!
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