There comes a time in every working filmmakers life where at the end of the day, they have to dump all the footage they shot onto a couple hard drives for delivery and backup. Quite often, this happens on-location or in the field, which is one of the reasons so many people have tried to perfect their backup strategy.
The perfect backup strategy isn’t an exact science though, and I’ve seen far too many people who are wrapped on set begin this process as if they were performing some sort of ritual. They’ll place their drives ever-so-gently into a pelican case, and then into another case, just praying that their process ensures a devastating jostle doesn’t occur in transit and ruin their transfer, or potentially corrupt their files. Usually, that means a transfer to one of the orange rugged drives from Lacie and then transferred to trusty G-Drives back at home base.
While those drives (and ones like it) are quite rugged, what if you wanted another option? What if you’ve got no room to spare in your bag and you’d rather have the peace of mind that your work is safe instead of hoping and praying nothing went wrong with your transfer or with the drives themselves?
The G-Drive Mobile SSD R-Series from G-Technology solves all of the aforementioned problems. As a Solid State Drive, there’s no needle to jostle, the speed far outpaces an HDD, and its’ size means you don’t need to make special space considerations when bringing it from here to there. Here are some stats from GDrive:
That’s all well and good, but if we’re being honest, it’s not that hard to evaluate whether or not a drive works. The big thing I wanted to test was whether or not I could actually trust it to not corrupt my footage under pressure. So, after two weeks of filming between my Canon C100mkII and Sony X3000, I loaded all of that footage on to the drive and did a perfectly normal, middle-of-the-road durability test: I took it back-country snowboarding.
[The full article written by Kenny can be found and originally appeared at ProVideo Coalition]