Around 2004 I worked for a company in The Netherlands that owned a Viper camera (one of the few in NL, I guess because they were based in Breda and Thomson had an HQ there). The company actually had a big Mercedes van that contained a Quantel iQ system just to record and postprocess the video coming out of that Viper.
In the years after that I worked with them to write a custom application based on a Bluefish444 card combined with some ATTO fiber channel storage just to get the frames to disk fast enough. A lot of custom code, overlapped I/O, that kind of thing. We had a beast of a JBOD RAID setup, must have been about 12 spinning disks.
The only alternative in those days were systems that stored to tape, but could only do so in a compressed format (I think Sony had a solution that did 4:2:0 instead of the 4:4:4 coming out of the Viper). People were scrambling for these storage solutions so much that we even got Arri to lend us their prototype D-20 camera (which turned into D-21 which turned into Alexa) just so we could make sure our storage system worked with their camera. We just had this amazing prototype camera sitting around our office for what must have been a year. They just lent it to us. Wild. I think our only main competitor at the time was Codex, which admittedly had a much slicker system.
We visited the CINEC trade show and got a ton of interest. I think I still have a business card of the DoP that did all the miniature work in Lord Of The Rings. He loved the fact that we would store things uncompressed, which would make things like compositing a lot easier.
Unfortunately, mismanagement caused the whole thing to collapse. Oh well. Nowadays you just use a CompactFlash card :)
A Mercedes van to lug it all around is both hilarious and also probably the coolest way to do it.
While working on set between 2012-2014, we were shooting all RED, and I had a 12-disk ATTO FC RAID10 rig on set at all times borrowed from RED. Not needed for speed of frames by this time of course, but for the ridiculous total storage required shooting 6.5k raw and the time needed to copy it all. On paper this system should've been good/safe enough. In practice, we almost lost it a handful of times within a month, each in a unique way, including the time a stunt driver messed up, veered off course, and plowed directly into video village, striking the RAID and killing exactly the maximum number of disks in one mirror it could tolerate, but thankfully no more. (Needless to say the shoot was a massive learning experience and I have never managed data the same ever since.) By the time the shoot was over, the RAID was alive, but it was absolutely beat to shit, and I was afraid of how the guy from RED would react when he came to pick it up. When he did, he was completely unphased. He chuckled and said, "You should've seen how messed it was after Ridley Scott's crew borrowed it!"
Very cool background though, I was not quite old enough to get into it all quite that early! When the Viper came out, I was still in high school, just exceedingly nerdy. I believe to this day I have PCs with ATTO Disk Benchmark on them