Recommended Drives and Storage

Owned by Robert Ridder
Last updated: Sept 25, 2024
2 min read

System Drive

  • A minimum system drive of 100GB is recommended.

Media Storage:

To ensure there are no bottlenecks during recording Cinedeck reserves the boot drive for system use, media can not be recorded to the C: drive.

  • Cinedeck currently supports all models of Samsung Drives, specifically:

    • Samsung 870 EVO series (excellent price/capacity)

    • Samsung 870 Pro series (highest performance, longest warranty)

    You may use other SSDs with your Cinedeck recorders. However, we may not be able to provide technical support should you have any issues due to non-approved SSDs.

    The Cinedeck development team can absolutely confirm that not all SSDs are created equal. SSD specifications advertised by manufacturers can be very misleading.

    Real-time video recording, especially multistream, is unlike any other use-case for SSDs.

    In general, most SSD drives are not optimized for best performance in this specific case. Also, some drives have extremely high failure rates.

    For instance, once Cinedeck had drives provided from a manufacturer for testing. They had a 100% failure rate within 6 months.

    This does not mean they all completely stopped working. But, they could no longer reliably record video.

    Don’t skimp on drives to save a few cents. It has a poor cost-benefit ratio. Especially, when you have to record an extremely costly production.

    We also advise you to always make a backup recording. Even if it’s just to the in-camera recording card.

RAID

Windows software RAID is not recommended as it has proven to be unreliable for both OS redundancy and for media storage. Do Not Raid your Cinedeck Drives!

Cinedeck's are primarily SOLID STATE recorders; recording should always be to Solid State Drives (SSDs).

We very strongly recommend that you do not use USB or eSATA drives based on spinning-disks including “Hybrid drives”. These devices are unsupported and their use is not covered by support. 

USB and eSATA are available for media offload but due to the vast number of variables involved in different mechanical hard drives and external enclosures, Cinedeck does not recommend or support recording to these external drives.  

While DAS and network devices are routinely used and are an approved workflow, Cinedeck cannot in any way guarantee that performance of any particular recording media or network device (including SANs, external RAID arrays, etc.), will be adequate to support the number of record channels directed to them. It is up to the end user to understand the risks and to have the technical expertise on hand to properly take advantage of recording media other than the internal SSDs, including tuning networks and storage devices for appropriate performance.

 

Network Storage:

  • If you are writing your media files to a network location ensure that both your network and your attached storage have sufficient bandwidth.