HGST, a Western Digital company (NASDAQ: WDC), and Maxx Digital today announced that RED Studios Hollywood has deployed the Maxx Digital Evo 6G 16-bay rackmount media server. The server is powered by 4TB HGST Ultrastar 7K4000 enterprise-class hard disk drives (HDDs) and configured with ATTO® Raid controller to support capacity, bandwidth and performance needs for streaming and “screening” next-generation 4K, 5K and 6K high-resolution files.

With the RED ONE® camera, RED DIGITAL CINEMA democratized 4K capture, challenged the status quo and redefined digital cinema. As the pioneer in 4K film production, their team opened RED Studios Hollywood to serve the greater film industry as an independent production space, as well as a local base of operations for their rapidly growing community of users, which ranges from film school students to Academy Award-winning directors. 

“With so many productions being shot on RED cameras, we found ourselves needing to increase our digital storage at the studio,” said Hugo Cargnelutti, special ops director, RED DIGITAL CINEMA. “As a long-time friend of RED, Ron [Amborn of Maxx Digital] offered to see what he could do to support us.  Teaming up with HGST, Maxx Digital provided us with an Evo 6G filled with 4TB HGST Ultrastar HDDs. Now, we have more than enough room to ingest, transcode, edit, and playback right here in our 4K theater.” 

A movie or TV show shot in 5K resolution can require up to 600TB+ of storage capacity and up to 2000MB per second (MB/s) sustained data rates for editing and post production to ensure data integrity, no dropped frames and a quick workflow. To keep pace with the storage needs for 4K digital cinema, Maxx Digital designed the Evo 6G 16-Bay solution to excel at handling data transfer at speeds of 1600MB/s. Coupled with the HGST 4TB Ultrastar 7K4000 drives, RED Studios Hollywood has access to the highest quality of data storage and performance. Maxx Digital RAID Arrays are used all over the world from small independent post houses, educational institutions, feature films, churches and government installations.

“As a company dedicated to building products that meet the extreme requirements of production, we use HGST hard drives exclusively to deliver bullet-proof hardware, massive capacity and the lighting fast storage that Maxx Digital is known for,” said Ron Amborn, president and CEO, Maxx Digital. “Through this partnership, we’re able to provide an industry leader like RED with the technology required to push creative boundaries.”

“Digital cinema technology is innovating to keep up with 2K, 4K and beyond,” said Brendan Collins, vice president, product marketing, HGST. “These high-resolution video formats require massive storage and faster data transfer rates to efficiently edit and distribute content throughout the workflow. The Ultrastar HDD family provides enormous capacity, solid performance and low power to meet the needs of today’s top film and television producers and digital content creators.” 

The Ultrastar 7K4000 is the world’s first 4TB enterprise-class 7,200 RPM drive. It features an industry-leading 2.0 million hours mean time between failure (MTBF¹) specification, and is available with a 6 gigabits per second (6Gb/s) Serial ATA (SATA) or serial attached SCSI (SAS) interface. It is specifically designed for 24x7 capacity-optimized applications such as big data, cloud storage, data warehousing, video-on-demand, surveillance, disk-to-disk backup, and massive scale-out storage implementations where storage density, watt-per-gigabyte and cost-per-GB are critical parameters. The drives are available in 4TB, 3TB and 2TB capacities and come with a 64MB cache buffer. A bulk data encryption option is available.

The EVO 6G can be configured from 16TB to 64TB.  This 16 bay chassis configured with an ATTO RAID controller can read a 4.0GB file with a frame rate size 2048 x 1556 10-bit RGB at 1664.2 MB/s, and can write the same file at 1300.8 MB/s. With the ability to daisy chain multiple EVO 6G RAID Arrays together much faster speeds can be sustained.