Blackmagic Forum

Hi everyone - so I'm finally diving into the BMD ecosystem with the 6k Pro and revising my storage needs around BRAW footage. So can anyone give me suggestions/real world experience about what kind of storage you're using? I was thinking about some kind of small 2 or 4 bay RAID array for my 2020 iMac - maybe Thunderbolt 3 based if possible - but feels like there's a lot of deal-killers out there like fan noise, reliability issues, etc. Would I be better off just getting a 8TB SSD, or will I regret the lack of storage?

My budget is around $1500. I'm happy to buy my own drives, put a storage system together, etc. Appreciate your thoughts!

Well, for any kind of storage you'll need a double backup solution and that can be spinning platters for sure.
8 TB SSD is still serious money, I'd use a smaller one and move only the bunch of files immediately needed for editing. That said, BRAW is not too demanding, it even plays off a fast spinning USB-3 drive.
But you may want to keep cache and other temporary files on a really fast storage. What's inside your iMac?

Uli Plank wrote:Well, for any kind of storage you'll need a double backup solution and that can be spinning platters for sure.
8 TB SSD is still serious money, I'd use a smaller one and move only the bunch of files immediately needed for editing. That said, BRAW is not too demanding, it even plays off a fast spinning USB-3 drive.
But you may want to keep cache and other temporary files on a really fast storage. What's inside your iMac?

I've got a 4 TB SSD that's only a third full - I kind of thought I could use the space for cache purposes, etc. I switched over the cache of some of my FCPx 1080p projects to the internal SSD as an experiment and got a nice little speed bump, which was encouraging.

I did kind of a ridiculous amount of research this weekend and decided to stick with physical platters, probably for the last time. I'm going with a LaCie 2big 28 TB Thunderbolt 3 RAID array that was on sale, with a local external backup and a Backblaze remote backup. (I have no data cap, so it's worked pretty well, though even with a fast pipe it takes quite awhile for the initial backup to finish.) That got me very comfortably under my budget, and should have speed and capacity to spare for my needs.

Thanks so much for your help!