Hi
I hope you'll be able to give me some technical and buying advice. Please excuse how wordy this is. I want to make sure I explain the situation correctly.
I work for a small animation company and we have been working on a project that requires some live action filming. We shoot HD footage on a Panasonic P2 camera which has two 64gb cards. We use the first card until it is full and then swap to the second so that we can keep shooting continuously. Whilst using the second I need to copy all the data off the first card onto a hard drive so that the card can be reformatted for use once the second card is full. For safety I have to make sure that I always have two copies of the data at anyone time.
On previous recording days I have copied the data via a USB card reader and my laptop to two separate portable hard drives. The trouble is that copying the gigabytes of data twice can often take longer than the amount of time that it takes to fill up the second card in the camera. So it often turns into a juggling act as I shift the data around. Sometimes requiring me to just dump the files on my laptop's smallish hard drive because at least I can get it there quicker. At the end of the day I take the two portable hard drives back to the office and make another archive copy of the files to larger network storage in the building. Again this is just for safety. I can't use the data from archive storage when I'm editing because it simply can't access the data quickly enough. This mean that I have to work from the portable drives connected directly to my computer.
So my question is could I use a small raid box with removable hard drives to speed things up?
What I'm imagining is that I have four 1TB drives in the box. They are mirrored into two pairs. So that when I copy the data from the camera card the raid box automatically makes a second copy. Once I get it back to the office I would still make a copy to the archive. However, I also want to be able to remove the two copied hard drives so that they are off site back ups. I then continue to use the half empty raid box as I edit the footage. I won't actually be modifying the data on the drives as I edit, I just need to be able to access it.
I'm not very clear on raid set up so I'm not even sure if what I've just said is possible. If I take two of the drives out would it still function? And would it then continue working without any loss of data when I put the two drives back in for the next shoot? I want to keep all the footage we've shot from previous days. Which is why I would be using terabyte drives.
If this makes any sense and you could recommend a reasonably portable raid box or similar, I would be most happy. Otherwise it's back to juggling data.
I've been given a £700 budget but I obviously want to make sure it can work before I spend anything.
Thanks.