Let’s talk about your memories (part two)
Types of Memory
Author: Adam Hogan
So, we should continue our discussion about all of your digital assets and data. In this post let’s breakdown and demystify where it is actually stored. First off, not all storage types are designed for the same function. In fact most types are actually designed for very specific uses, and choosing the wrong type of drive for your purpose can lead to massive workflow problems, incompatible data, or catastrophic data loss… Essentially, we can divide storage types into three main categories. The first I’ll call “casual storage”, the second “working storage”, and finally archival or “long term storage”.
Casual Storage
These are the standard, inexpensive, readily available spinning hard drives. This could include drives that are bus (power from the USB) or externally powered. These are great options for backup or transportation of data and can even be a good option for personal long term storage (if properly maintained). However, this type of drive is built around an actual spinning disk that uses a hardware reader head, and depending on RPMs of the drive the read/write speed will be very slow causing a bottleneck that will drastically slow down your workflow when working with an NLE, DAW or image editor. Also because these drives have moving parts, as we edit we force the drive to jump around (spinning up again and again), it is highly likely that the drive may suffer a hardware failure causing you to lose everything on the drive.
Spinning drives come in several flavors, but the important thing to remember is the RPM speed dictates how fast it can read/write. Anything below 7200rpm is really too slow for HD editing, not to mention 4k, 6k, or 8k workflows. Most of the smaller (physical) sized, inexpensive high capacity drives are 3000rpm - excellent for casual storage, backup, or transportation, but suffer from low read/write speeds. They are fantastic as a way to have a lot of space to back up a project in the field, then drop in the mail and send to a collaborator but always add in hours to wait for the files to transfer onto and off the drive. Often for casual users these may be the only type of external drive they need, however for those of us that are bent on working with data/media on the scale that we do as artists, composers, filmmakers, designers, etc., it is important to understand how they can fit into your workflow.
Working Storage
SPEED is the number one thing you need out of hard drives you are directly working from as a scratch/cache disk. Well, speed, reliability and capacity, and depending on your own workflow the order of those priorities might be slightly different. You might be thinking, can I just get the fastest, most reliable, and highest capacity drive to do all of my projects on? And of course you can, but that will come with a very high price tag, so it becomes a balancing act between those three elements (plus form factor). There are two basic categories of fast drives that are suitable for working directly on, single drives and RAID drives.
Single Drives - SSD (Solid State Drives) make the most reliable/fast single drives. They benefit from high read/write speeds and have no moving parts so they are not as susceptible to hardware malfunctions. Samsung’s T5 is a great budget option for a small external SSD (which can be used with our cinema cameras). You can also use a 2.5” internal SSD with a dock.
RAID Drives - (Redundant Array of Inexpensive/Independent Disks) are a storage configuration that uses a series of independent drives linked together as one volume. RAID 0, 1, 5 etc… Basically if we have 4 drives arranged in RAID 0, a portion of the data is broken up into 1/4 portions and written across 4 drives, reducing the total amount of data being pushed to a single drive, thus speeding up the read/write speeds beyond the speed of any single drive in the system. RAID 0 is for the fastest speeds but you could also use a RAID to build redundancy into a workflow if you use a RAID configuration above 0. Just remember as good as redundancy is, it does not count as a “backup”… RAID Drives can be made using traditional spinning disks or SSD.
Archival/Long term storage
The last type of storage is long term or archival storage solutions. SSDs have become very reliable but due to the cost per GB they don’t make a great long term solution. Spinning disks offer a good solution and cost per GB but need to be configured in a way that can be serviced, preferably with built-in redundancy due to the fact they are prone to hardware failure.
Tape Drive - A large format of storage for linear access storage that uses magnetic tape.
Optical Disc Archive - high capacity archive drive built around multiple optical discs and fiber channels.
And just for fun… DNA - Researchers have used synthesized DNA to encode and store digital data including text, music, images, and even films. In fact Microsoft and the University of Washington published and demoed DNA computations in real time! A few years ago, a paper was published by researchers at Columbia that laid out the possibilities of super high-density, large-scaled data storage in which a single gram of DNA has the capacity of 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes).
To be fair currently digital encoded DNA is extremely cost prohibitive but the technology is evolving quickly and could potentially (in theory) store all data and information ever created by humans in a few tons of DNA material.