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If you’re a video or animation editor who often works in high-definition projects — and there are more and more of those happening these days — having a lot of storage around to keep all those mammoth digital files handy is a huge advantage.
After all, a typical HD movie can soak up an average of 50GB to 100GB of space. If you have a few hundred of those babies lying around, it’s not easy to find places to put them. Of course, if one simply has a lot of files, period, something like 12TB will satisfy most storage needs for quite a while.
The OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2 (pictured) is a monster 12TB enterprise RAID (redundant array of independent disks) storage drive, designed with a highly-reliable 2 million MTBF (mean time between failures) for critical business applications that must never go down.
Mean time between failures (MTBF) is the predicted elapsed time — in this case, hours — between inherent failures of a system during operation.
The QX2, which retails for $2,200, is comprised of four 3TB HDDs, all situated in hot-swappable drive bays, so replacing a bum disk is quite easy.
OWC, based in Woodstock, Ill., offers four interfaces for the QX2: FireWire 800, FireWire 400, USB 2.0 and eSATA.
The mammoth storage machine also features selectable RAID settings of 0, 1, 5, 10; 300MB/s data transfer rates for high speed; plug/play storage and redundancy for either Macs and PCs. It’s all covered by a 5-year warranty, OWC said.