Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Non powered firewire cables!

But it doesn't matter very much if it's a rare problem or not.
Knowing that it could happen to me some day is what makes
me not very confident about my gears. I'm not going to tell
the director when it happens that it is a rare problem and we
are just a rare group of people to experience the problem, right?
 
Nook Kim said:
But it doesn't matter very much if it's a rare problem or not.
Knowing that it could happen to me some day is what makes
me not very confident about my gears. I'm not going to tell
the director when it happens that it is a rare problem and we
are just a rare group of people to experience the problem, right?
Click to expand...

It's kind of a miracle that these drives work as well as they do, but with this news, the shaky confidence I had in them just dropped even lower.
 
wihout drive power supply what is safest way

wihout drive power supply what is safest way

Ok, I've been powering the drive and offloading for two years now with a regular firewire 800 cable with no issues without the power supply. I have it but really didn't think it was needed.

So I'm on location in San Diego Ca. now and didn't bring my drive power supply. I've always just plugged in the drive and it mounted up no problem, so my question is.

Without the Power Supply and regular firewire 800 cable, what IS the safest way to mount the drive and copy as there's no getting one here before we leave tomorrow for Ensenada.

Best,
Frazier
 
Correct. RAID controller card. Data lost.
Though I have had an 800 port go wrong. Fixed by Red under warranty...
Cheers,
Harry
 
Harry,
I'd like one of your extra cables.
(Nice working with you the other day).
 
Hi Peter...
Yes, we had a good time! Hope the other day went well too...
Check my earlier updated post. Those cables were no good and I sent them back. I switched to the pigtail isolator cable but only got one for personal use plus one for each of my Red cameras. They are available here:
http://www.angledcables.com/firewire-800-port-isolator--8009.html
Cheers,
Harry
 
If you're on a laptop, you can also use a FW800 expresscard adapter. Most don't supply bus power without an external power supply plugged into the expresscard.
 
Device chaining!?

Device chaining!?

Reading this thread, I've noticed something rather distressing:

Do some people actually hook up a RED Drive on a FireWire CHAIN?

Granted, I don't see any explicit setup descriptions from anyone here, so maybe people aren't doing this, but here's why you shouldn't:

The FireWire bus is by design capable of providing a significant amount of power to devices. Way more than USB. 45W at variable voltage up to 30V. So 1.5A at 30V or 9A at 5V. Pretty potent stuff (for computing anyway.)

Your average hard drive will spin along at under an amp at 5V. It will however, pull several amps to get started (typical electric motor resistance.) Now, remember that the RED Drive is in fact TWO hard drives. Now add extra power for RED's fancy RAID controller.

While it may putt along happily under 3A, booting a RED Drive on a system can take half or more of a clean 5V supply from the bus. Power usage does scale with disk activity, but never exceeding that of a cold start. If that bus is already providing power to other devices, at another operating voltage even, you could get yourself in a serious pickle. Running out of power is where the trouble starts.

Now, transfer speeds (important!) The 800 in FireWire 800 refers to the total number of bits in the pipe— 800mbps (rounded.) You can have 800mbps of active transfers on the bus doing whatever you want. If you read from the RED Drive and write to another drive on the same bus, you've just cut your effective bandwidth in half, as you can now read at 400 and write at 400 (total 800.) Divide by 3 for 3 drives on the chain, 4 for 4 and so on. 4 drives. 200mbps, might as well be sending the data offsite via carrier pigeon.

Transfer speed alone should discourage chaining with a RED Drive. The power scenario should be nail in the coffin.

I give a RED Drive a straight hookup on it's own FireWire bus. The performance and reliability is fantastic. Hook the target drives up elsewhere. USB2 is perfectly good for them. A decent system (read: Not typical laptop) will have at least 2 USB root buses so you can run two target drives simultaneously at full speed. A full speed read from FW800 will happily saturate two parallel USB2 buses. The RED Drive has excellent random access performance.

When I'm teching, I like to make sure that the producer doesn't have to wait around for their drives.

Here's my rule on FireWire device chaining. If the device doesn't have the two ports necessary on it to support a chain; that's the manufacturer's subtle hint that this device probably shouldn't participate in one at all.

And no, the 6-pin port on the RED Drive doesn't count.

That said, those port isolators are pretty clever, and I may have to get some for the drawer. BUT some FireWire devices may not work if there isn't power there, even if they don't run off the bus power themselves.

So it looks like here's the thread take home:
  • USB + Power = Good idea
  • FW800 = Good idea
  • FW800 + Power = BAD IDEA
  • FW800 with no power + Power = Good idea!
  • FW800 and multidevice chain = BAD IDEA for so many reasons
  • Unclean power to computer devices on set = Preposterous
 
I have never heard of anyone daisy chaining through the FW ports and didn't gather that from this thread.

According to RED, this is an "endemic" problem with any device using firewire. Specifically to RED, with any combination of power & cabling using FW800. Powered with AC or not.

Seems like a good opportunity for those R2E cables to be used again. Or better yet, for Red, have an offload station with their own connectors that uses an actual drive cable port.
 
Jordi, you have it fine. Derrick seems to have misinterpreted a few things. Best practice is to run the Drives (and RED RAM) with the supplied AC adapter. It doesn't matter if the Firewire cable passes power or not. Plug in the AC power first, then connect the drive to the host computer. This way, you won't over-draw the firewire port of the computer/drive when it spins up and not if it goes under heavy load.

A module with RED's own connectors (LEMO RED Drive connector) for offloading would be ideal. This came up in the RED Station thread and in here a few posts back. That would be awesome, but they're plate is overflowing as it is and the Drives/RAMs are now EOL.

I know several people are thinking they will be using their RED Drives for years to come. I suppose that's possible, but lets face it. They're based around mechanical and magnetic spinning media. They will only last so long.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
I know several people are thinking they will be using their RED Drives for years to come. I suppose that's possible, but lets face it. They're based around mechanical and magnetic spinning media. They will only last so long.
Click to expand...

Not so sure about that, look at any inventory at the average rental house. No rams, hundreds of CF cards and tons of red-raids. There's enough of them out there.

Also, take into consideration the scarlet users. How many are going to pay top dollar for SSD's if they can get cheap used drives, which will ultimately plummet in resale price.
 
Thanks, Jeff.

Quite what I thought. The practice you say for the RED DRIVE is the one I always apply. It always seemed the most logical to me.

A bit out of topic, I know you are right. The Drives will have it's live. They have they downs, but mine has been truly reliable this 2 years. I'm gonna go the SSD way when I can afford it, but I would like to be able to buy a couple more drives...

Cheers.
 
Harry Clark said:
Thanks Quentin.
Yes, I believe this is a good "best practice" to follow when powering from the Red Drive Power Supply and using Firewire to move data.
Can you post a direct link to the product you chose?
Nice to have options...
I think Brent was not put off by discussion, debate, or even the critique of Red's lack of information regarding the use of non-powered cables. It was the tone and rudeness of some of the posts (and sadly there seems to be no shortage of such posts on reduser)
In CJ's defense, he did apologize. And he IS right in saying that it's really Red's job to outline "best practices" for the safe use of their products, and not leave it up to the community to figure it out.
Let's remember that it is a RARE problem, and now the information is out there, and we can all take appropriate steps to mitigate the problem.
Cheers,
Harry
Click to expand...

Just wanted to point out that if you are looking at purchasing from the sources listed in this thread: usbfirewire and angled cables have the exact same street address in Wichita, KS = 1815 E. Douglas and phone numbers...yet they have different prices.

On another note: Would a Lemo to eSata cable (+ power adapter) be a solution?
 
Steffen Vala said:
...On another note: Would a Lemo to eSata cable (+ power adapter) be a solution?
Click to expand...

A third party used to make one that worked. Unfortunately, drives with upgraded circuit boards to fix intermittent Esata playback errors on camera meant that this cable no longer works to connect to PCs and Macs because, I believe, the voltage levels are no longer within normal Esata spec.
 
Thomas Wright said:
Couldn't someone just tell us which pin to remove?

Bit of a bodge but it could be a cheaper solution.
Click to expand...

Sure!

Take a look at either end of your cable and you'll notice that there are 5 pins on the flat side and 4 pins on the notched side.

1. Position the the cable so that the 4 pins and notch are facing downward.

2. Now that you can see five pins in a row on top, locate the 4th pin on top (counting from left to right).

3. Take a tiny flathead screwdriver (the kind used on electronics) and pry it up from its plastic bed.

4. Use your screwdriver to gently pry it back and forth until it snaps off.

5. Test your new handy dandy non-powered cable on a cheap FW800 device. ;)

Voila!! ...a relatively simple, yet very effective way to make your own non
powered firewire 800 cable. Enjoy! :smiley:

P.S. You only have to do this procedure on one end of your cable.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top