We all know there are two kinds of drives that we work with regularly as filmmakers.
The first is our "backup" drive. The big, heavy, cheap drives that we download our camera footage to and then leave in our closet for safekeeping.
Then we need a working drive. It has the dailies or the media managed raws for finishing. It's always with us if we have an idea or when a client sends through a note in the middle of the night and keeps our more active projects "hot."
That second working drive needs to be small, rugged, and fast.
Caldigit is hoping to hit all three points with the new Caldigit Tuff Nano, an SSD drive that is tiny, rubberized to IP67, and hits up to 1055mb/s of transfer speed.
The key features of this little unit are the combination of super-fast speeds with durability.
Right now it's only available up to 512GB, though we can assume a 1TB unit will be out soon. This is the kind of drive that lives in your bag with the ProResLT dailies of your current project on it so you can pull it out and work whenever you have a spare moment.
That's where the IP67 durability rating, which is good for drops and waterproofing, comes in.
If you are a normal filmmaker, you sometimes jostle your bag around a bit...or spill coffee...or leave a banana in there...and a protected drive makes sense for those kinds of scenarios. This self-contained drive, which even has a little rubber cover you can pop closed over the porthole, is ideal.
And it's small.
Smaller than a penny in height, and at half the size of an iPhone, we're finally reaching the point with hard drives where it is easy to just keep them with you at all times. The read/write speeds aren't just going to be useful for super-fast file copies, however.
One common scenario when finishing a project is to media manage the full res media to a smaller folder.
If you had a 26TB set of source media for an 8K feature, that is obviously not going to fit. But the final 90 minutes of 8K might easily fit (it'll be around 400GB depending on your RED settings), and you could use this drive for finishing your 8K RED raw movie if you wanted.
Really useful if you are working in a bigger facility and might get moved from machine to machine but don't want your project taking up space on the shared storage.
Tech Specs
- Bus-Powered
- IP67 Certified
- Premium Toshiba NVMe SSD
- Compatible with USB-C, USB-A and Thunderbolt 3 computers
- Compatible with iPadOS, macOS, Windows, ChromeOS and Linux
- Tuff nano is pre-formatted for macOS (HFS+) and ready to use
- Interface USB 3.2 Gen 2 (10Gbps) Type-C Port
- Read Speed Up to 1055MB/s, Write Speed Up to 900MB/s
- Length: 2.99 in (7.59 cm), Width: 2.14 in (5.44 cm), Height: 0.57 in (1.45 cm), Weight: 0.163 lbs (0.074 kg)
- 2 Years Limited Warranty
The Tuff Nano is available now and costs $130.
Check out the Tuff Nano page for more.
