Just a few thoughts after bringing our 2 Stardom ST8-2SP's online

Just a few thoughts after bringing our 2 Stardom ST8-2SP's online

From: http://www.polarartproductions.com/

No one intends to have a hard drive nightmare when they start out, but in the old model as it existed, it was destined to happen ... buy a 500gig, fill it up .... buy a one TB, fill that up, again and again. Multiply this by years of work, an ever growing library, and then add RED 4.5K to the mix with the EPIC close at hand, it has become a near disaster in organizational terms, and a complete C... F... when it comes to external power supplies and pigtails for each drive unit. For a small independent, where a server or large raid capacity was beyond the budget, the only realistic choice was to keep buying hard drives/enclosures ... until now.

The Stardom ST8-S2P's bring a revolution to the requirements of media storage, organization and efficiency for a small independent production company such as ours. In terms of flexibility, space, cost, ease of use and execution with our MAC based edit suite, I can confidently speak to the ST8-S2P as being the most important and necessary step forward in embracing a future of independent digital cinema production. First and foremost, the ST8-S2P mounts so quickly and reliably I'm beginning to enjoy starting up the edit bay .... soon the apprehension, the dead empty feeling that comes when .... the drive won't mount ... file not recognized .... (sorry, I can't continue, you get the point), will fade to distant memory.

Of all the drive failures I've experienced, only one was an actual drive failure. Most failures are drive controller related, a corrupted Directory/File Structure resulting in the entire body of data rendered inaccessible. Nothing against Disc Warrior and whatever .... I'd rather not have to know they exist. The ST8-S2P mounts more responsively, more surely than any external drive I've ever used, a credit to your engineering department. In fact, the ST8-S2P is the only external drive system that I've ever seen mount as reliably as my MacPro's internal drives.

Equally important, the ST8-S2P enables me to manage my own hard drive program. If I need to add drives, swap out drives, back-up and archive ... I decide the size and manufacturer, I buy at the best market price and more cost effectively manage our ever increasing storage requirements.

In today's business climate, managing overhead is critical. This is no industry that tolerates, nor should it, an inferior product. In order to adopt to a changing playing field, the real trick for any business is how to maintain and grow product quality and reliability, yet remain financially viable in difficult times. This requires innovation, adaptation to new and emerging technologies and willingness to break old models. RED is such technology. Stardom is such technology.

The ST8-S2P has enabled me to cut in half, the cost of adding harddrives. Moving forward from a 4.5K world into 5K and beyond, this is critically important. It seems so simple, so necessary, so matter of fact and natural upon the implementation of such technology, that one soon wonders how things would work any other way. They very well may not.


Thanks again, Jon, and thanks to Stardom

Best,
Art
PolarArt Productions