Over the two decades I’ve spent in the production industry, I have bought hundreds, if not thousands, of hard drives.
Whenever I’m faced with making a new decision, I’ve been awed at the technological improvements that have developed.
I buy fewer drives these days because, for the past two years, I’ve been directing a team to build a cloud storage environment called Alteon Cloud. We believe long-term storage is best handled primarily on the cloud, where footage can live behind iron-clad security, and sharing files remotely takes a single click. But that doesn’t make drives obsolete—far from it.
It may sound contradictory for me to say, but I believe drives will remain fundamental to production workflows for years to come. Cloud storage will always be beholden to internet speeds, which are unlikely to keep pace with ever-larger camera resolutions. And for remote shoots where real-time internet uploads aren’t possible, you’ll need a rock-solid drive that can survive in the field.
For these reasons, I was excited when the team at OWC reached out to offer us some drives to test with Alteon Cloud.
We sampled the OWC Envoy Express with an NVMe M.2 drive, the OWC Envoy Pro with an SSD drive and the OWC ThunderBay 4 RAID. We tested each multiple times with different media files. We uploaded one 15.8 GB, H.264 video file on a MacBook Air with a WiFi connection (119 Mbps upload speed); the same video file on a hardwired (434 Mbps) desktop; and 10 videos (13.15 GB total, ARRI Alexa ProRes) on the same hardwired desktop.
Alteon Cloud automatically transcodes proxy files, but that process is real-time. (A one-minute video takes about one minute to transcode, for example.) We therefore only tested one simple thing: how long did it take to upload the standard video file (or files) onto Alteon Cloud from the OWC drives?
Read our full results at Rocket Yard, OWC's blog.