Building Your Encoding Hardware - A Practical Guide to Video and Audio Compression - page 460

Now multiply this by the number of projects you want to work on. This is without
building archival space and allowing additional workspace for storing video-editing ses-
sions, building special effects, and any other ancillary tasks.
The simplest answer? Just buy as much space as you can afford. Don't even bother
buying less than a 500 GB disk as your main workspace unless you are only working on
small projects, and think about how you are going to get all that material offline to a
backup medium to make space for the next project. The best solution might be to just use
a LaCie big disk for each project, then put them on the shelf and plug in a new drive for
each job.

29.9.8 Storage Cost

The cost of storage measured in dollars per GB reduces as you purchase bigger disk
drives. Table 29-2 lists some representative prices per GB from companies selling disk
products. These are provided for comparison and may change, although their propor-
tional costs with respect to each other will probably be more stable over time.
These prices are approximate and will fluctuate as market conditions change. The
prices are more likely to go down rather than up. What is more important is the relative
pricing. Buy the right sort of disk space for your system (and your budget) as well as the
required capacity. NAS storage is about twice as expensive as RAID storage on its own.
Pocket drives are cheaper if you buy the larger-capacity units. Simple FireWire 400 drives
are the cheapest of all, so going on these figures, I would recommend purchasing 500-GB
desktop drives because they are a reasonable size for working on projects and the cost per
GB is about the best available value. Paying more for RAD storage, however, buys you
performance, throughput, and error resilience.

Table 29-2 Dollars Per GB

Description Size Per GB

Xserve RAID 1.00 TB $3.8

1.75 TB $2.8

3.5 TB $2.1

HP StorageWorks NAS 320 GB $6.05

640 GB $3.76

1.00 TB $2.95

Portable pocket drives 60 GB $2.03

160 GB $0.66

200 GB $0.70

Formac FireWire 400 160 GB $0.60

250 GB $0.53

320 GB $0.50

500 GB $0.52