Pro Moviemaker Summer 2018

AGENDA LACIE

“Enterprise technology we have been shipping for nearly ten years is coming to consumers” removing those ports rather than adding them!” In terms of performance, Seagate is now driving forward its development of ever-faster and reliable SSDs thanks to its recently-announced deal to be part of the group acquiring Toshiba. “We’re going even deeper into the flash business,” says Tim. “Hard drives are still very important for us as SSDs have penetrated notebook. The capacity has gone down significantly in these notebooks so people buy an external drive for backup. “In future, we will continue to make HDDs and flash but the key is performance. It’s not one 4K streamany more, as when you’re editing youmight have four 4K streams at the same time. That’s why you need fast transfer, via Thunderbolt 3. The spec is 40GB/s but you don’t actually get that. It’s more like 2.8GB/s which is plenty to streammultiple 4K and 8K streams for editing. It’s not capacity, performance is becoming amore dominant variable.” Seagate is also focusing on capacity. It recently showed off a 60TB SSD and at NAB it had 104 SSDs raided together for one petabyte of storage. That’s 1024 terabytes! And these aren’t just any SSD drives, as not all drives are created equal, explains Tim. “Flash drives have a finite life but it depends on the quality of the flash. We have Enterprise flash SSDs and we have consumer SSDs. I wouldn’t storemy Star Wars movie on a consumer SSD, but the Enterprise class are fine,” he says. “You are limited to the number of writes on a SSD but that’s been changing quite a bit. We embrace both flash and HDD technologies and you will seemore and more of both solutions coming out. “We also have had Seagatememory cards shipping for a while but not in UK or USA, yet. With the Toshiba acquisition, we now have an ample supply of flash.” Seagate and LaCie are continuing to innovate and Timhints theremay be some big news on the horizon. “Price has come down a lot. We recently unveiled our HAMR - Heat Assist Magnetic Recording – technology. With this you’ll have a 20TB single drive, and that’s just around the corner. It’s not a $100 situation at first but it will be in the future.”

LaCie goes for performance and security

The revolution in hard drive storage enters a new era where speed and safety are crucial

T he rush to bigger storage devices shows no sign of slowing down, with camera resolutions getting higher and higher. And there’s the additional needs of VR. But the real key to the future of how data is stored will be around speed and safety. That’s the view of one of the topmen in the global hard drive and storage industry, TimBucher, senior vice president of Seagate. He looks after all the consumer products made by Seagate and its extended family of companies like LaCie. With the Seagate group being one of the two global giants making hard drives and flash storage, he understands what filmmakers, as well as other users, want of data – from consumers on their mobile phones to Hollywood SFX specialists. “We have seen an exponential rise in the amount of data created,” he says. “First 720p was the big deal, then 1080p and now 4K, 8K and VR goggles.” With lots of data beingmoved around, security is a problem. The data for things like Hollywoodmovies is vast, so can’t

be stored on the cloud. That means hard drives with sensitive data are oftenmoved around - which is why leaks can and have been happening. “These TV andmovie data breaches are occurring as people ship large hard drives to colour correction and editing. These are billion dollar issues for films like Star Wars. To be able to secure those is really important,” says Tim. “To prevent that we now have the LaCie Rugged Secure, currently in a 2TB version though there will be higher and lower capacity versions. It has hardware encryption. The device doesn’t have storage of the key, so you can make sure it is only shared with trusted sources. “We will start doing this on standard hard drives. It’s Enterprise technology that we have been shipping for nearly ten years that we are bringing to consumers.” And for security of your data on location, the new LaCie Rugged RAID Pro has two separate drives inside as well as an SD slot. “For creative professionals, it’s nice to have that when notebooks have been

ABOVE LEFT The man at the helm of LaCie and Seagate”s consumer products talked to Pro Moviemaker exclusively.

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PRO MOVIEMAKER SUMMER 2018

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