The Hard Truth about Hard Drives

Hey everyone,

First of all, make sure to pick up or order your hard drive soon. You'll need to bring it to our third lecture on 2/13/20. 

Here are some guidelines: 

• Speed: Solid state drives are both reliable and fast. If you get a spinning drive, we strongly recommend getting a 7200 RPM drive instead of 5200 RPM. 
• Space: I'd recommend getting at least a 1TB hard drive so you can use it going forward in your film classes. As per the syllabus, you'll need at least 250 GB. (1TB = 100GB.) The more space you get, the more you'll be able to save to the drive.
• Connections: Make sure the drive at least has USB 3. Thunderbolt is even faster, although the prices can go up. 
• Brands: We also recommend that you stick to name brand drives such as G-Tech, Seagate, WD, OWC, LaCie, Samsung, or SanDisk, and avoid the host of lesser known drives.

And here are a few recommendations to get you started:

1. WD 500GB My Passport Go SSD Cobalt Portable External Storage: $70 - Solid State Drives are fast and more reliable. 
2. Glyph Technologies 500GB Blackbox Plus USB 3.1: $129 - Good brand. Solid State.
3. WD 1TB My Passport Go SSD Cobalt Portable External Storage, USB 3.0: $150 - Solid State with 1TB of space.
4. Samsung T5 Portable SSD - 1TB - USB 3.1 External SSD: $158 - Solid State with 1TB of space.
5. G-Technology 1TB G-DRIVE ev RaW USB 3.0 Hard Drive with Rugged Bumper: $79 - 7200 spinning drive (not solid state). 
6. Glyph Technologies 1TB Blackbox Plus 7200 rpm: $110 - 7200 spinning drive (not solid state), good brand. 
7. Glyph BlackBox Pro 2TB Rugged Desktop External Hard Drive: $140 - Gets you some extra storage (2TB) with a good brand. 7200 spinning drive.

If you are looking for budget options, I'd recommend choosing between option 1 and option 5. Option 1 will be more reliable but option 5 gets you twice as much space. As with a lot of filmmaking, you have to weigh your options within your budget. There are always trade-offs!

If you purchase through B&H, make sure to sign up for the student discounts!

And please share any additional drive recommendations or questions in the comments below.

Finally, here's the hard truth about hard drives: all hard drives fail. If you want to keep your media in the long-term, you'll want to have everything backed up between at least 2 drives. And/or look into cloud storage like Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.