external drive for creating DCP from MKV and ingesting into GDC SR1000

[Robert Kwalick]

Our 18 month old Fantom Gforce 3 external drive that we've used to transcode and ingest DCP's made from Blu-ray discs just failed.
Somewhere along the line I came to believe that for this kind of work we would need a drive that was 2TB and that had an external power supply, but is this true?
Can I use a USB powered drive as long as it has enough space (I own several) or do I need a new drive that plugs into the wall?
I know that the USB port on the GDC media block is USB 3...
Thanks!

[Greg McGuire]

Robert, you should be okay with any external drive. I would also recommend that it be formatted as EXT 2 or EXT 3.

I use a 2 TB Samsung T5 when I need a USB drive, but most of the time, I'm just ingesting from a network drive on a Synology NAS.

[Ryan Gallagher]

We do a lot of manual ingesting into our older GDC for the smaller theatre. We have a couple usb 3.5in disk caddies, mix of spinny disk and ssd. If you are buying I recommend high capacity SSD so jostling it is not a concern since there will be a lot of handling. Ours powers directly from the GDC face panel without issues.

[Ryan Gallagher]

We have a couple usb 3.5in disk caddies, mix of spinny disk and ssd.

If it wasn't apparent, I meant 2.5in caddies!

[Carsten Kurz]

Wether your server can supply enough current for a USB device can only be found out by testing. If it has an explicit USB3.0 port, you should not run into problems. I would suggest a 2TB SSD nowadays. It offers a little bit protection in case it is dropped, and it will also usually need less power, as there is no 'motor spinup' as with rotating discs. Don't go above 2TB. I would suggest MBR partition table (sometimes now complicated to create, at least in windows).