By Tom Coughlin
It was great to be able to attend some media and entertainment industry events in person this year, including late April’s NAB Show in Las Vegas. This two-part article looks at trends in digital storage and their applications for all aspects of professional M&E, including some insights from my 2022 Digital Storage in Media and Entertainment Report.
Part 1 of this M&E storage update will cover hard disk drives (HDDs), solid state drives (SSDs), media cards and related solutions and archiving products. Part 2 will cover storage solutions, storage software and cloud solutions.
Solid State Storage Growing in Video Production and Post
Because of higher performance and ruggedness, solid state storage based on NAND flash memory is desirable for many media and entertainment applications. Flash memory is the dominant storage media for professional video cameras, as shown in the figure below. HDDs, the next largest camera storage media, are popular for use in studio recording, where ruggedness is less important than for recording in the field, and with content for which higher data rates are less critical.
Percentage of various recording media in pro cameras
Companies such as Angelbird, Crucial, Panasonic, Sony, SanDisk (WDC) and Lexar offer flash-based media for content-capture applications.
As the size of video files increases, performance and latency become more important. The performance and latency requirements of multi-channel raw 4K and 8K video post production storage exceed the capability of HDD-only storage systems. With declining NAND flash prices, storage systems with flash-based SSDs are becoming primary storage for many applications with hard disk drive-based systems often used for secondary storage.
NAND flash-based SSDs working on the PCIe computer bus — especially those with NVMe interfaces — have become the dominant SSD interface. As a consequence, NVMe SSDs are competitive with SAS SSDs. NVMe avoids the built-in legacy overhead of SATA and SAS interfaces, allowing more of the internal performance of flash memory chips to be available to the PCIe bus.
NVMe SSDs are available from many companies, including Intel, Kioxia (formerly Toshiba Memory), Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix, Seagate and Western Digital. NVMe-enabling technology is available from companies such as AMD, Huawei, Intel, Marvell and Mellanox (now part of Nvidia).
Western Digital’s Pro-Dock 4 media reader docking station
HDDs and SSDs
At NAB, I had an opportunity to visit with Western Digital and to attend its May 9 analyst event. Western Digital was showing its SanDisk professional branded products, including the company’s new Pro-Dock 4 media reader docking station. This is a four-bay docking station that works with Pro-Reader devices, which allow offloading popular camera memory cards as well as connecting displays, drives and A/V devices. Note that the Pro-Readers allow reading the memory cards to a computer, independent of the dock.
The dock includes Thunderbolt 3 connectivity and can charge devices and accessories with 87W power. Bolts on the side make it possible to attach the device to a DIT card or other gear for video production. The dock works with macOS 10.9+ or Windows 10+.
The company also introduced its Pro-Blade modular SSD ecosystem (see below). This consists of a Pro-Blade SSD, a modular NVME SSD, a Pro-Blade Transport portable unit that the Pro-Blade slips into and a Pro-Blade Station. The Pro-Blade and Pro-Blade Transport will ship in June, while the Station is expected to ship in late 2022.
At NAB, Western Digital also showed a 7.68TB G-Drive Pro Studio desktop SSD as well as SSD and HDD G-Drive products, including a 4TB portable SSD and a G-RAID Shuttle 8 that holds up to 160TB using 20TB Ultrastar HDDs.
Also at NAB, Seagate had a booth with its Lyve and LaCie products — in particular, the Lyve Mobile solutions for moving data around. This product can go into an interface unit. Seagate also showed racks with Lyve Mobile unit interfaces for transferring data to storage arrays. The Exos HDD arrays on display also included a Pixtor unit.
On display was LaCie’s line of portable storage products as well as its HDD-based 1big Dock with storage capacities up to 18TB. Seagate also demo’d its cloud offering, Lyve Cloud, which has no egress fees or API charges.
Storage Media
Besides SSDs, the 2022 NAB Show also had flash memory cards and storage modules on display. Many other exhibitors had memory cards branded by Kodak, Emtec and other companies.
I visited the Codex suite at the NAB show. Codex provides storage solutions that service popular digital cameras in the company’s MediaVault product line. The MediaVault Transfer gives productions an affordable option when filming in disparate locations without compromising the time-to-delivery of a day’s or week’s set of shots. By leveraging MediaVault Transfer’s compute, storage and processing capabilities, production teams can store large quantities of data on-set, transport the newly lightweight and ruggedized MediaVault Transfer to a nearby high-bandwidth, Codex-certified ingest facility, and quickly return to set with the system now freed up for more footage.
Codex
Codex also talked about its partnership with AWS on a Codex Global drive to facilitate remote production work.
Storage for Archiving
Long-term storage of video content requires inexpensive storage. However, today’s archived content is accessed more readily than older, passive archives, often offline in cold-storage facilities. For this reason, many archives are now “active archives” that provide lower-latency access to archived content. The ultimate storage for these active archives will be on magnetic tape (mostly LTO), optical discs and hard disk drives.
Although there is still a considerable amount of older video content that has not been digitized, much of the content slated for digitization has already been digitized or will be in the next few years. For this reason, future archive growth will be increasingly driven by archiving of new video content, as shown in the figure below.
Archiving and Digital Conversion and Preservation
Companies making archival media and systems include Disk Archive, HPE, IBM, MagStor, mLogic, Panasonic, Quantum, Seagate, Sony, Spectra Logic, Storbyte, Symply, Toshiba, XenData and Western Digital.
At the Symply booth, I was shown several Thunderbolt LTO tape drives and some desktop stacked storage systems using Seagate Mach.2 HDDs. A demo showed this running at very high data rates.
In addition to Symply, there were at least two other vendors offering external LTO tape storage devices. These included Unitek with a USB 3 system and MagStor with a Thunderbolt 3-certified tape drive, also shown below.
Symply
XenData’s booth at NAB displayed LTO tape and optical library systems, including the X40-S archive appliance with an expandable LTO library that scales to 9.9 petabytes. They also showed how they work with partners, such as Wasabi, for cloud storage as part of a hybrid cloud storage offering.
Speaking of archiving, StorageDNA demonstrated its DNAfabric cloud storage cost-modeling tool to enable predictive cost analysis and modeling across hundreds of cloud tiers and thousands of cost metrics.
Archiware introduced its P5 Data Mover, which will be available in Version 7.1 of the Archiware P5 data management platform. The Data Mover is an extension of the P5 Archive module. According to the company, “It offers policy-based moving and copying of archived data between tape, cloud and disk storage. This HSM-like extension offers flexibility for any storage strategy. Data can easily be migrated or copied between storage tiers. A migration plan runs periodically and selects data according to a predefined age. This way, users can automatically move data from hot storage to cold storage and in any direction they need.”
Tom Coughlin, president of Coughlin Associates, is a digital storage analyst and business and technology consultant. Coughlin Associates publishes books and market and technology reports, including The Media and Entertainment Storage Report and an Emerging Memory Report.
