Recommended DIT Shuttle Drives
Beyond storage capacity, speed and connectivity are the most critical factors for DITs working with today’s high data-rate formats common in TV and feature films.
“A key consideration is that the speed of the entire backup process is limited by the slowest drive in the chain.”
For example, if the technician is offloading to production RAIDs and their own fast local storage — both capable of 2 GB/s — but the end-of-day shuttle drive can only write at 500 MB/s, then the process bottlenecks at that slower speed. This directly increases the amount of post-wrap overtime the DIT role is often burdened with.
Choosing shuttle drives that can sustain fast read and write speeds, ideally matching or exceeding the maximum read speed of the camera cards, ensure that the offload process is completed quickly and efficiently.
Thunderbolt supported drives are preferred, as they rated for fast read and write speeds, that can also be sustained for extended periods of time.
Some cheaper drives often claim they are capable of high-speed read and write capability (1GB/s +), however under sustained operation, they overheat, or their internal write buffer becomes saturated and their performance drops significantly
The drives that we recommend are listed below:
Drives to avoid for workflows where original camera media is backed up to the shuttle drives:
- SATA SSD drives - these are limited to 500MB/s. Too slow for modern workflows
- Mechanical spinning hard drives. Limited to 130MB/s.