Rustic River Media

The Rising Cost of Storage: A Growing Challenge for Professional Videographers and Photographers

When people think about the costs of running a video production or photography business, they usually think about cameras, lenses, lighting, drones, or computers.
One expense that rarely gets talked about is storage.

Just over a year ago, I built two 168TB RAID 5 arrays for Rustic River Media: one serving as my primary working drive and the other as an identical backup. Each RAID was built using an OWC ThunderBay 8 enclosure and eight 24TB Seagate IronWolf Pro hard drives.

At the time, each RAID cost about $4,270, or roughly $8,540 for the pair.

Fast forward a little over a year, and those arrays are nearly full. Like most production companies, our content library continues to grow with every project we complete, so it was time to price another matching set.

Here's what that same setup costs today.

The exact same RAID would now cost approximately $8,692 to build. Building the same A/B setup again would cost roughly $17,384.

That's an increase of $8,844 for the exact same storage capacity.

No additional performance. No larger capacity. Just the same hardware costing nearly twice as much.

There are likely several reasons for the increase, including inflation, supply chain pressures, growing demand for enterprise storage driven by AI and data centers, and import costs. Whatever the cause, the reality is that storing data has become significantly more expensive.

For production companies, storage isn't optional. Our clients expect projects to remain archived, and protecting those files requires more than a single hard drive. I maintain two mirrored RAID arrays plus an additional offsite copy because RAIDs alone are not enough to be considered a backup solution.

These are costs clients never see, but they are part of the infrastructure required to safely capture, protect, and archive their content. Like any business expense, they eventually become part of the cost of providing professional video and photography services.

I'm curious—have other videographers and photographers noticed similar increases? How has it changed your storage or backup strategy?

Some of the most important moments in a company aren't found in annual reports or press releases.

They're found in the voices of the people who helped shape them.

This is a behind-the-scenes look at the first of eight interviews we captured for Pirkey Barber's 20th anniversary film. While the final cut will only be a few minutes long, it represents decades of experience, relationships, and lessons learned along the way.

We're looking forward to sharing more from this project in the weeks ahead. 🎬🎥

Just wrapped a great week of filming in Austin, TX, capturing eight interviews and a full day of B-roll for a wonderful law firm whose attorneys are at the top of their field. We can’t wait to dive into post-production on this one. 🎬🎥