The Move Towards Motion – Part 17 Protect Your Data.

advent of Solid State Drives (SSDs) things are now much better, since these have less moving parts than their Hard Disk Drive (HDD) predecessors, using flash memory as opposed to spinning disks to read and write data. This makes them much more robust but, as always with new technology, when they first hit the market they were much more expensive, and professionals often took their chances rather than make the substantial extra investment. Things have moved on, however, and prices have dropped considerably, and they are now much more affordable and very much the storage device of choice for the filmmaker.

storage device of choice for the filmmaker. “When it comes to what we at CVP will recommend you offload your media onto it will really depend on your budget and what system you’re using,” says Jake. “However, one thing I would always suggest is picking up SSDs whenever possible, since the price of the storage has dropped substantially and they don’t suffer from the reliability issues that traditional spinning disk hard drives do. We actually put a video together comparing four G-Technology external hard drive options (link at the end of this feature) and this helps to explain the differences and shows why SSDs will be the better choice in most scenarios.”

To give some idea of how much external hard drive options have advanced in recent years you only need to look at a product such as the G-Technology ArmorATD Drive, which has been built very much with the requirements of the modern field-based videographer in mind. For a start, it’s small and compact and comes with USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt 3 connections to ensure superfast data transfer at up to 140MB/s, meaning that it’s entirely realistic in the field to be downloading footage in-between takes.  Previously this would take so long to do that it could use up precious shooting time, creating the temptation to skip the process.