Answering your hardware questions!

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I'm going to use the laptop with the larger drive as a download for REDstation 1.8" as it has eSATA connection. The Retriever duplicator should save me some time in not having to reload everything that's already on the old drive as I would have to do after doing a clean OS install. I agree that there are other ways to duplicate a HDD... Acronis, I think is a viable solution. I was curious if there might be some Registry problems.

The duplicator will do this just fine. But since it won't know what to do with the extra space on the larger HDD, it will leave it hanging there. You will still need to use another HDD utility on the computer to attach that extra space to the primary partition and extend your partition across the entire drive capacity or you will have to create a separate partition for use. Not a big deal in the grand scheme of things...

The main reason for buying the Retriever is that it will do a standalone duplication of a data drive that contains offloaded footage from the onboard laptop HDD. That is, I have only one eSATA connection so will have to offload onto my larger laptop HDD, then will transfer that footage via eSATA onto a 2.5" HDD in a docking station. Then I can make a duplicate backup using the standalone Retriever.

Now I'm confused. Why would you want to do it this way? That is going to be SLOW. OK, so you have an eSATA connection... That's fine and great, but the internal laptop HDD is going to be a bottleneck, so it's not going to be a fast offload to begin with. Then you are going to disconnect the media from the eSATA port and connect a new HDD? Then copy from the internal laptop HDD to the new one? So, then after you've gone and made and ate a sandwich and come back, it might be done... So then if you want a duplicate, you're going to put it into this retriever thing and make it duplicate it?

What other ports or expansion does this laptop have? Hate to say it, but if you're upgrading from a 60GB HDD in the thing, it probably is at least 4 or 5 years old... Is it worth it vs. just buying a new system with more appropriate ports? Does it have an ExpressCard slot? Why not buy an ExpressCard to eSATA adapter and give yourself another usable eSATA connection or two?

If you're taking the extra step of copying to internal laptop storage, only to hold data so you can copy it where it needs to go, you're making the process unnecessarily complicated and a lot slower, not to mention increasing the chance of error.

...Just my $0.02.

I've been looking for a solution to be used with a Windows Laptop that would allow HDMI INPUT, that could be used for instance to unsqueeze 2x anamorphic, maybe apply a LUT or just capture a still and apply some looks. But more on the budget side. Then feed the output to a larger say 32in LCD as a preview for clients. The output shouldn't be a problem, but just need a way to feed in 1080p.

Thank you.

HDMI input is kinda quirky and not really a consumer application or something that comes at low cost. Even more so when it comes to anamorphic scaling and LUT application, looks, etc.. Your best bet is something like the BlackMagic UltraStudio -- available with USB3.0 and Thunderbolt interfaces. Other than that, you would probably do better with a stand-alone scaler unit. I believe some of the scalers out there, like the ones from DVDO, may allow for anamorphic scaling or some mode customization.

What is your source? I'm assuming a prosumer camera where you're capturing the HDMI feed anyway, something that takes interchangeable lenses, but has no anamorphic functionality...?

[Elsie N]

...
Now I'm confused. Why would you want to do it this way? That is going to be SLOW. OK, so you have an eSATA connection... That's fine and great, but the internal laptop HDD is going to be a bottleneck, so it's not going to be a fast offload to begin with. Then you are going to disconnect the media from the eSATA port and connect a new HDD? Then copy from the internal laptop HDD to the new one? So, then after you've gone and made and ate a sandwich and come back, it might be done... So then if you want a duplicate, you're going to put it into this retriever thing and make it duplicate it?

What other ports or expansion does this laptop have? Hate to say it, but if you're upgrading from a 60GB HDD in the thing, it probably is at least 4 or 5 years old... Is it worth it vs. just buying a new system with more appropriate ports? Does it have an ExpressCard slot? Why not buy an ExpressCard to eSATA adapter and give yourself another usable eSATA connection or two?

If you're taking the extra step of copying to internal laptop storage, only to hold data so you can copy it where it needs to go, you're making the process unnecessarily complicated and a lot slower, not to mention increasing the chance of error.

...Just my $0.02.

Heh, heh, heh, heh, forgot to mention I'm working on a nil budget. Yes this laptop is an older core2 duo dell. The ExpressCard to eSATA adapter is my only eSATA connection. All others are USB 2.0. I have a newer HP laptop that also only has one eSATA connection and USB 2.0 connectors so I will have to use the same getup for each of my two Epics. (One delivered and the other Stage 3) I figure the 750GB HDD should give me 5 offloads of my 128GB SSD Redmags and that should cover about what I will be able to shoot in a day per camera.

Then, at night I will set up each laptop to offload onto a docked HDD, drink a lot of water before going to bed so I will wake up during the night needing to pee at which time I will switch one of the docked HDDs into the standalone drive duplicator. By morning it should be duplicated and before going out to shoot I will put the docked HDD from laptop number 2 into the standalone drive duplicator and will then have originals and backups for the previous day's shooting for each camera.

Buying a newer laptop with more ports is not an option at this time.

Did I mention that I'm working on a nil budget? ;-]

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I understand the zero-budget thing... So with that in mind, I bid you good luck. You may do well enough to just offload from RED Station via USB2 onto the eSATA HDD directly and not onto the system drive first. Yes, the USB2 connection is slow, but it can still handle roughly 40MB/s transfer rates. The 750GB HDD, assuming you buy the fastest one on the market and the old laptop can do it justice when connected internally, you're going to get writes in the neighborhood of 60-75MB/s. Read speeds will be faster.... Then let's say you have a similar drive connected externally to SATA... Same thing.

So, doing your talked about method above, to offload a full 128GB SSD card, it's going to take about 30 minutes, give or take, assuming you do well and hold about 70MB/s writes -- doubtful. Realistically, it's going to be closer to 40~45 minutes. Then you have to do it again to copy from the internal HDD to the external via eSATA... If you use a similar external HDD, it will take about the same amount of time. If you go with a really fast 3.5" HDD (without going RAID), you can probably get the copy time under 30 minutes. Let's assume you do well and it takes 20 minutes. Best case scenario, it's going to take around 55 minutes round-trip with this method plus extra user interaction., in order to get your data from the RED SSD to an external HDD.

Or... You could just connect the external HDD via eSATA and the RED Station module via USB2.0... Sure, USB2 is slow, but it's still capable of sustaining a bit over 40MB/s reads for real-world use. At 40MB/s, you can offload a full 128GB SSD in about 53 minutes. So your method above is not gaining you any time savings and is requiring more interaction. Just sayin' you should probably eliminate the middle man on this one. You're going to get the same slow speed no matter which method you go with.

Another option... Does your eSATA card support port multipliers? Or what if you replaced it with a dual-port card? Connecting both the RED STATION and an eSATA enclosure at the same time, via an eSATA interface. Yes, they would split the port and bandwidth, but a good eSATA card can saturate the 250MB/s ExpressCard bus and you should be able to get 100MB/s give or take to each device. In a nutshell, you should be able to offload your data and write it to the HDD as fast as most single HDD's can handle. Just something to think about....

[Elsie N]

I understand the zero-budget thing... So with that in mind, I bid you good luck. You may do well enough to just offload from RED Station via USB2 onto the eSATA HDD directly and not onto the system drive first. Yes, the USB2 connection is slow, but it can still handle roughly 40MB/s transfer rates. The 750GB HDD, assuming you buy the fastest one on the market and the old laptop can do it justice when connected internally, you're going to get writes in the neighborhood of 60-75MB/s. Read speeds will be faster.... Then let's say you have a similar drive connected externally to SATA... Same thing.

So, doing your talked about method above, to offload a full 128GB SSD card, it's going to take about 30 minutes, give or take, assuming you do well and hold about 70MB/s writes -- doubtful. Realistically, it's going to be closer to 40~45 minutes. Then you have to do it again to copy from the internal HDD to the external via eSATA... If you use a similar external HDD, it will take about the same amount of time. If you go with a really fast 3.5" HDD (without going RAID), you can probably get the copy time under 30 minutes. Let's assume you do well and it takes 20 minutes. Best case scenario, it's going to take around 55 minutes round-trip with this method plus extra user interaction., in order to get your data from the RED SSD to an external HDD.

Or... You could just connect the external HDD via eSATA and the RED Station module via USB2.0... Sure, USB2 is slow, but it's still capable of sustaining a bit over 40MB/s reads for real-world use. At 40MB/s, you can offload a full 128GB SSD in about 53 minutes. So your method above is not gaining you any time savings and is requiring more interaction. Just sayin' you should probably eliminate the middle man on this one. You're going to get the same slow speed no matter which method you go with.

All good options, but I think anything involving USB 2.0 is going to put me in jeopardy of having to wait for the SSD to be offloaded. I (hope) to have two 128 GB SSDs for each camera. My real concern is that in some instances I may have to wait for a download to finish in order to have a fresh SSD. But I'll see how things go. What you suggest may be workable. Oh, and the HDD I am installing in the laptop is a 7200 RPM Seagate Momentus.

Another option... Does your eSATA card support port multipliers? Or what if you replaced it with a dual-port card? Connecting both the RED STATION and an eSATA enclosure at the same time, via an eSATA interface. Yes, they would split the port and bandwidth, but a good eSATA card can saturate the 250MB/s ExpressCard bus and you should be able to get 100MB/s give or take to each device. In a nutshell, you should be able to offload your data and write it to the HDD as fast as most single HDD's can handle. Just something to think about....

I'm not sure about supporting port multipliers but yes, my card is a dual port SIIG Expresscard 54 RAID Pro, I think. I was not aware you could use the ports as an input and output at the same time. I've only used them as a RAID 0. This would be a VERY good thing if that will in fact work.

How do I find out if it will support port multipliers?

Thanks Jeff.

[albert rudnicki]

Thank you Jeff !
I 'll try first the adapter cable, my macpro is not overloaded with power hungry cards.
Any idea where I can get the adapter?
If that doesn't work, I think I am going to get combo quadro and sale my 285.
Cubix is really expensive...

thanks again

Albert, it is possible, but a real pain in the ass. You will need to come up with an additional power lead. Easiest solution is to tie onto the molex in the lower optical bay, however you may have issues with that depending on if you have a device there already and how much power it consumes. You may need to add a buffering cable rather than a straight adapter cable. I tried this exact configuration in an '09 Mac Pro and couldn't get power right without using a buffering cable (hard to find off the shelf) and under peak load I would experience fall-offs or insufficient power since I was also using the power lead to that optical bay to run a 7200rpm 1TB HDD. I was leaving the two onboard PCIe power leads connected to the GTX285 and pulling additional power for the Quadro, as it only requires one.

If you want my thoughts on it, I would say spend the extra bit and replace both of your video cards with dual Quadro 4000's. Or get a PCIe expansion box and move the GTX285 out of the main tower for use as your accelerator in Resolve.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

All good options, but I think anything involving USB 2.0 is going to put me in jeopardy of having to wait for the SSD to be offloaded.

I agree. But the solution you were talking about above involving copying to the system, then copying out isn't going to be any faster. My numbers were representative of using a "fast" drive like the 7200rpm Momentus.

I'm not sure about supporting port multipliers but yes, my card is a dual port SIIG Expresscard 54 RAID Pro, I think. I was not aware you could use the ports as an input and output at the same time. I've only used them as a RAID 0. This would be a VERY good thing if that will in fact work.

I have never used that specific card. But I would be completely shocked if it did not allow you to attach two individual SATA devices and use them independently.

How do I find out if it will support port multipliers?

RTFM? Actually if it has dual ports, then chances are it is multiplier-based anyway, most of the dual-port ExpressCards are using a multiplier. That being the case, you already have two ports and shouldn't need an additional multiplier cable or similar. You usually will not want to double-up on multipliers, that's when bad things happen.

[MacGuffin Films]

Hello All,
I've been looking into getting a new MacBook Pro for the company I work for. Price isn't really an issue, so I'm going with the 17" to get the express slot. My only question now is whether to go 750GB HDD or 500GB SSD. I've heard issues with the SSD having slower write speed over time and a limited number of writes. I've also heard "limited number of writes" means 40 years worth of constant writing. The computer would be mainly used for on-set media management. The company workflow consists of downloading Red footage directly to the laptop hard drive first. Which would allow me to have the fastest and most reliable transfer from Red CF card/SSD card to my laptop hard drive?

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Interesting to see the love for dumping camera data to internal laptop drives. If you absolutely have to have the most minimal download footprint possible then I guess it makes sense, but like Jeff I just see more copy steps in your future. This leads to more opportunity for errors as copies are made of copies, more human interaction required, ...

My suggestion for laptop based field backup strategies is to use bus powered drives and a dual port eSATA adapter. If you're comfortable with using bare drives, RED has a 2.5 RED station which stacks neatly with the 1.8 RED station that reads the SSDs - slick. Cheaper 3rd party enclosures are available as well but if you can swing the $250 for the RED version it is solidly made, has proper heats sinks and should hold up well in the field. YMMV.

Cheers - #19

[Jean Wallez]

My suggestion for laptop based field backup strategies is to use bus powered drives and a dual port eSATA adapter.

Is it possible to do backups from an 1.8 e-sata redstation(bus powered : usb?) to 2 e-sata (bus powered : usb?) 2.5 drives with R3Ddatamanager on an only battery powered laptop?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Hello All,
I've been looking into getting a new MacBook Pro for the company I work for. Price isn't really an issue, so I'm going with the 17" to get the express slot. My only question now is whether to go 750GB HDD or 500GB SSD. I've heard issues with the SSD having slower write speed over time and a limited number of writes. I've also heard "limited number of writes" means 40 years worth of constant writing. The computer would be mainly used for on-set media management. The company workflow consists of downloading Red footage directly to the laptop hard drive first. Which would allow me to have the fastest and most reliable transfer from Red CF card/SSD card to my laptop hard drive?

You guys trying to copy to the laptop HDD first, then re-copy to another drive are nuts. Why? Serious question, I gotta know, because there's no rational explanation as to why anyone would choose to do this. Extra user interaction required, means more potential for error. Additional generational copies means more room for error unless you create a verified checksum on the first copy and continue verification through the process. Now you're taking a heck of a lot longer to make the copies. In any serious work environment with lots of media being cycled, this workflow is not going to keep up. So yeah, color me confused on this one. If price isn't really an issue, then there's no reason for this. If it's "the company workflow", it might be time to find out who at the company dictates workflow policy and have them try to explain this one. I can think of plenty of reasons to not do it this way and can't think of absolutely zero reasons to do it this way.

OK, highly-opinionated rant mode off now...

As for the question of HDD vs. SSD, I recommend the 750GB HDD. Plain and simple, the SSD's just don't offer the price to performance ratio. Write times are about 30% faster than the HDD on average, sometimes they peak or burst faster, but 30% is a good rule of thumb here. And they begin to drastically slow down as the SSD fills up. In fact, by the time you're operating at 90% capacity, that HDD could very well be winning a speed race against the SSD. On the other hand, read times with the SSD are going to be nearly 3X as fast on average. And this remains mostly constant, no matter how full the SSD becomes.

It's true that SSD's will wear down with repeated use, begin to degrade and slow down and will eventually die. Don't worry about it. The average number of cycles it takes to cause all this to happen is quite high. It's more an issue if you will be using SSD's in RAID configurations, but there are SSD's on the market that are made for that sort of thing. Realistically, an SSD will last about the same as a HDD. The real kicker is that either can die at any point in their life cycle for no apparent reason. AppleCare covers SSD and HDD crashes. Of course, if you don't have your data backed up, you're SOL. SSD's are more reliable in a sense that they don't have the moving parts (well, the gate cells of the FLASH nand chips technically move at a near-microscopic level, but that's a different story). They don't have the rapidly spinning platters and servo-driven magnetic heads that all can suffer from motion, vibration, etc.. while running. But an SSD is just as likely to suffer catastrophic failure as a hard drive... shit happens.

I think your best bet would be to go for the HDD and get a nice ExpressCard 2.0 26Gbps eSATA adapter to use as well as a ThunderBolt HDD or RAID. You can connect a RED Station module or two with the eSATA card and you can offload to the ThunderBolt storage. It will be screaming fast and you don't have to do the whole copy to the onboard HDD and then copy elsewhere circle-jerk thing. Even ignoring ThunderBolt, a dual-port eSATA adapter will let you read from a RED Station module and write to an external HDD at about 200MB/s or so, if you buy the right adapter. Firewire 800 offload from the RED Station will get you close to 90MB/s read and that can go to eSATA output just fine too. If you're using a single 2.5" or 3.5" HDD as the target drive, that's going to be about as fast as they will average on their own anyway.

Some aftermarket SSD's are faster. The OWC 6Gbps SSD's are excellent, and the OCZ Vertex3 as well as the Mushkin 6Gbps ones are great too. These units are scoring anywhere from 220 to 290 MB/s write times on uncompressible data (R3D, Zip, H264, etc..) as long as you don't run with them more than about 65% full. They're all fast enough to saturate the 6Gbps SATA host for read times on compressible data at almost 560MB/s. So something to consider there. The 480GB OWC Extreme Pro 6Gbps is arguably the best one out there right now and can top 480MB/s for uncompressible data reads. It's nearly $1200, though. You can buy a LOT of 7200rpm 750GB hard drives for that price. And as fast as it may be, it's still going to be slower to offload your data to it, then turn around and copy it again to another drive.

Is it possible to do backups from an 1.8 e-sata redstation(bus powered : usb?) to 2 e-sata (bus powered : usb?) 2.5 drives with R3Ddatamanager on an only battery powered laptop?

Yes. But it depends on the laptop and if its USB header(s) can handle powering that many devices properly. And there's a good bet you may run out of battery before you finish your transfers if you're powering a RED SSD reader plus two external hard drives. Many laptops can't fully power all USB ports unless you're connected to AC power. I'm also assuming that you will be only using the USB to provide power and will be attempting to use eSATA for the actual data connections -- FW800 can bus power as well and is obviously a lot faster for data - about 80% faster than USB2.