Red Drive

[Shawn Nelson]

320gb RedDrive was pretty rockin cool a year ago, but shouldnt we be seeing either a massive price cut or a spec increase (say a 1TB model)?

Also, why hasnt a third party made drives, is there something proprietary in them that prohibits it?

 

[Alexis Hanawalt]

2.5" HDDs are nowhere near the specs of full size drives to this day. I'm sure RED went with the 2 160's because anything above a 160 just wouldn't have the reliability/speed required... same issues when selecting drives for laptops. Hitachi's got 500's, but they're slower and a bet a lot of other stuff is missing in the fine print.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

With the current crop of 2.5" HDDs on the market, I would think the reliability is there. The speed is most definitely there. I think the only reasons that RED would not offer updated drives is that they don't want to perpetuate new models of vulnerable magnetic media with moving parts. And because it took them a significant amount of time to tune their firmware for both the RAID host and the HDD's to perform as desired. I'm speculating a bit, but I know the RED Drive is more complex than simply sticking two 2.5" HDDs in a box with an off-the-shelf RAID controller.

That said, I honestly wouldn't want any larger capacity. I have never had an issue with my RED Drives, but they still give me the willies when I start getting 20 minutes or more of footage on them, and I begin jonesing for an offload / backup. I always pull a RED Drive at the 30-minute mark or the first opportunity I have close to that time, and do a backup. I do it earlier and more often when I can.

For me, I say bring on the RED SSD Drives! At this point, I would only be more interested in HDD-based RED Drives, if they could greatly increase my offload speed - like more than double. That would also mean they would need a better connection than FW800. Which brings me to the question of the upcoming RED SSD units... They're supposed to be fast. Will we get an eSATA port on them?

 

[Andrew Walker]

That said, I honestly wouldn't want any larger capacity. I have never had an issue with my RED Drives, but they still give me the willies when I start getting 20 minutes or more of footage on them, and I begin jonesing for an offload / backup. I always pull a RED Drive at the 30-minute mark or the first opportunity I have close to that time, and do a backup. I do it earlier and more often when I can.

I'm the same way. I don't like to have very much footage on the drive just incase. Unless its stuff that I know I can just shot again and again I'm not that concerned about the drive getting full. But I have never filled up the drive. So for me the current capacity is just fine. SSD would be the way to go once that gets all worked out.

 

[Dylan Reeve]

RED have said they have custom firmware on the drives, that may limit the options somewhat. But that's just speculation. I believe 500GB is the largest 2.5" SATA drive currently available. But I think 320 is probably a better mark.

Question is, does the drive need to be any bigger - at least with the RED One anyway. Call me crazy, but once you start to get anywhere near 320GB of footage on a drive I'd be getting very itchy about wanting it to be on at least one other drive. The more you have on one unit, the more you have to lose if something goes wrong. It would suck to have the steadycam operator trip over at the end of a day and crash the heads on 640 or 1000GB of footage.

 

[Paul Leeming]

At this point the only limitation to having a third party drive is an artificial one.... that of Red limiting any non-approved external recording medium to 2K:

There's some sort of approved drive firmware table in camera blocking any other recording medium from working at full spec.

Hence the new 16GB CF cards needing build 17 firmware, as that doubtless has the additional entry in the table for it. That's why it won't work with build 16 or limits you to 2K even though it's a Red endorsed drive.

I'm in contact with Red about our own third party solution that lots of people are asking for. See my LEMO/SATA cable request in another thread for a bit more info. We are basically done with it, we just need a way to prove it on camera at full speed which is currently impossible due to the above mentioned limitation.

Stay tuned.....

 

[Joe Walker]

320gb RedDrive was pretty rockin cool a year ago, but shouldnt we be seeing either a massive price cut or a spec increase (say a 1TB model)?

Also, why hasnt a third party made drives, is there something proprietary in them that prohibits it?

Yeah, and where are the solid state drives?

 

[Ryan Valle]

Yeah, and where are the solid state drives?

I dont own a RED camera but have done camera work and aware with some of the bumps and other roughness a drive can go through during shoots and transportation and being the computer geek I am, I know that these kinds of environments aren't ideal for mechanical drives. Heck, I tapped a portable hard drive on something lightly and the next day it wasnt working anymore. By using an SSD, you lose the moving parts and have greater reliability in the drive especially on rough environments and during transportation. There's the CF card, which is pretty much a small size SSD, available for those kinds of situations but at 16GB maximum capacities, I am sure that it is goign to be a hassle. panasonic and sony has done a wonderful thing with their memory card systems and that is that they have two slots to allow for continuous recording. I think it'd be wonderful if RED does this to their new cameras and their CF card slot. I think it'd be great to be able to have practically unlimited recording capabilities by having dual CF card slots that you can hotswap and if it happens to get full during the recording, the recording wouldn't stop, but rather continue on to the next card.

Just these many thoughts on the recording format, but in short, I think an SSD would be a great option for RED to release along with many more different recording options they can release on top of that.

 

[Jon Schellenger]

Speaking of the hard drive- Let me ask you guys something that I have been experiencing on my drive.

The last four shoots have had a strange issue where the fourth take will not transfer over to our raid system. I hook the drive up via firewire 800, it takes a second and then the drive icon pops up on the screen. I then go and drag the entire folder over to our raid drive that I set up, and after a few moments it locks up. The progress bar is still up on the screen but it is no longer transferring data.

This has happened over the last four shoots. Build 17 had it, and I just placed build 18 on the camera and I had the issue tonight.

If I go in and grab the shots from number 5 and down, they will transfer. Then I will go in and grab the first 3 shots and transfer those over. However, the fourth one seems to have strange bugs.

Sometimes if I have a few .R3D files linked together in the same number 4 folder, I can salvage part of the shot.

Has anyone come across this? Is this a drive issue or a weird bug in build 17?

Let me know what you guys think.

Thanks again

 

[Ryan Valle]

Has anyone come across this?

I don't own a RED (as mentioned above) so I am speaking from a theoretical standpoint. My guess is that a certain part or file in the drive may be corrupted, making it difficult/impossible for the computer to copy out. I've had experience with that occuring with other media files on externals (and optical media such as CDs and DVDs) and that was the only reasoning I could find - corrupted data. I sure I hope I am wrong, but its a possibility. Considering that its happening frequently, I would also make it a possibility that portions of the drive itself is damaged so any data "recorded" in the damage area can not be recoreded or read. Just a thought, but hopefully it will get you somewhere.

 

[Pawel Achtel]

With the current crop of 2.5" HDDs on the market, I would think the reliability is there. The speed is most definitely there. I think the only reasons that RED would not offer updated drives is that they don't want to perpetuate new models of vulnerable magnetic media with moving parts. And because it took them a significant amount of time to tune their firmware for both the RAID host and the HDD's to perform as desired. I'm speculating a bit, but I know the RED Drive is more complex than simply sticking two 2.5" HDDs in a box with an off-the-shelf RAID controller.

That said, I honestly wouldn't want any larger capacity. I have never had an issue with my RED Drives, but they still give me the willies when I start getting 20 minutes or more of footage on them, and I begin jonesing for an offload / backup. I always pull a RED Drive at the 30-minute mark or the first opportunity I have close to that time, and do a backup. I do it earlier and more often when I can.

For me, I say bring on the RED SSD Drives! At this point, I would only be more interested in HDD-based RED Drives, if they could greatly increase my offload speed - like more than double. That would also mean they would need a better connection than FW800. Which brings me to the question of the upcoming RED SSD units... They're supposed to be fast. Will we get an eSATA port on them?

Depends on your workflow. I like filling up the drive, back it up (either progressively or at the end) and use another drive, so I have two copies. It may be a month before I can clean the drives and make another copy. I would welcome higher capacity because I use the drives for storage until I come back from expedition/trip.

 

[Dylan Reeve]

Has anyone come across this? Is this a drive issue or a weird bug in build 17?

Let me know what you guys think.

It seems hard to believe that if it were a firmware bug that we wouldn't have heard more widely about it.

It could be that there is a physical error near the 'beginning' of the drive that is affecting those shots, but it seems unlikely that if that were the case that it would consistently hit the same take, unless you just happen to been shooting the first three takes to a consistent length.

I suspect only RED can tell you for sure what is happening with that.

 

[Mathias Erichsen]

This is kind of nice 2 TB in one SD-card... http://www.sdcard.org/developers/tech/sdxc

 

[Craig Schober]

bigger drives

bigger drives

With the current crop of 2.5" HDDs on the market, I would think the reliability is there. The speed is most definitely there. I think the only reasons that RED would not offer updated drives is that they don't want to perpetuate new models of vulnerable magnetic media with moving parts. And because it took them a significant amount of time to tune their firmware for both the RAID host and the HDD's to perform as desired. I'm speculating a bit, but I know the RED Drive is more complex than simply sticking two 2.5" HDDs in a box with an off-the-shelf RAID controller.

That said, I honestly wouldn't want any larger capacity. I have never had an issue with my RED Drives, but they still give me the willies when I start getting 20 minutes or more of footage on them, and I begin jonesing for an offload / backup. I always pull a RED Drive at the 30-minute mark or the first opportunity I have close to that time, and do a backup. I do it earlier and more often when I can.

For me, I say bring on the RED SSD Drives! At this point, I would only be more interested in HDD-based RED Drives, if they could greatly increase my offload speed - like more than double. That would also mean they would need a better connection than FW800. Which brings me to the question of the upcoming RED SSD units... They're supposed to be fast. Will we get an eSATA port on them?

i'm sure the customization and testing of that is a part of the reason but i really think red is just laying low and making a nice profit here on every drive that ships now. they're red drive profit margins were probably slim a year ago but now it's getting better and better so why rock the boat when few customers are asking for more storage space.

but they should upgrade the drive. i've rarely had the need for more space but there are plenty of event videographers that could frequently use twice as much space. and wouldn't an increase in drive storage and aerial density offer faster offload times too (assuming we're not hitting our theoretical maximum rate with fw800). not to mention a higher ceiling for storage resulting in less dropped frames toward the end of the platter (this i have experienced). red could even charge a premium for 1tb drives and customers would pay.

i don't buy the "nervous about too much data in one place argument". if you are that nervous, you will make time to backup incrementally instead of being lazy and using slightly outdated capacities to justify your laziness. i'm still waiting to learn my lesson but until my red drive crashes on me and i lose a half day's shoot, i say more capacity is only a good thing and only getting cheaper.

i got into the red game as part of the money saving effort. that means i've never used the cf card for anything important because that would mean purchasing many cards (too expensive and easy to lose) or hiring someone to dump the contents every few takes (expensive and time consuming). that's wastful and reminds me too much of a film shoot.

 

[Dominic Cochran]

So you're saying those who are nervous about a spinning hard drive and who back up every 30 minutes as opposed to filling up the drives and then backing up are lazy?

I don't understand your logic here.

 

[Jonas Rejman]

It seems, that there are two kind of users. Those who has lost data due to drive error, and those who has not. It seems, that wigby is latter kind of person.

It is very ugly when it happens. It is something incredible frustrating, because you know, what you should have done, and how easy it could have been to prevent this. You will see. :tongue:


Of course, Pavel's situation is different as I guess you cannot schlepp around RAID 5 racks on an expedition, but even he surely offloads as often as possible, even when he keeps the data on the drive.

 

[Dylan Reeve]

On location a single mirrored RAID unit presents the most convenient backup option. A single device, one copy/backup operation.

But it isn't as flexible as having two distinct copies, it also presents a single point of failure (sort of).

For an IT and data security point-of-view, I feel most comfortable when a file is in two physically separate places. But in practice that isn't always the easiest option - but depending on the value of the project, and what's at stake, it can certainly be worth the effort.

Drives don't die often but it does happen. A mirrored RAID will protect against a single drive failure, but is just as vulnerable to physical or electrical damage as one device. Also the failure of the RAID controller can present serious problems, as the data is unusable until a compatible replacement is found.

I think best practice is certainly to make two verified copies on location and then keep those copies physically separated until the production is complete - one is the work copy, the second is a backup. Coincidentally this is the process we've designed SolidStore to facilitate.

 

[Jaime Vallés]

Drives don't die often but it does happen. A mirrored RAID will protect against a single drive failure, but is just as vulnerable to physical or electrical damage as one device. Also the failure of the RAID controller can present serious problems, as the data is unusable until a compatible replacement is found.

Absolutely. Something that RED would be wise to implement in the upcoming Scarlet & Epic modules is the ability to record footage to 2 separate RED-DRIVES simultaneously. If this were possible, it would become my preferred method for shooting in a heartbeat.

 

[Dylan Reeve]

Absolutely. Something that RED would be wise to implement in the upcoming Scarlet & Epic modules is the ability to record footage to 2 separate RED-DRIVES simultaneously. If this were possible, it would become my preferred method for shooting in a heartbeat.

Not a bad idea, but realtime writing to two devices makes things a little more complicated - for example what do you do if you have a write fail on one of the two? Abort both, or ignore knowing that one is okay. In a non-realtime system you can retry the write, something which might not be possible with realtime demands.

 

[George Wilcox]

Rockin SSD's Coming Soon?

Rockin SSD's Coming Soon?

There have been a number of very cool announcements at CBIT this past week - Toshiba has announced a 512GB 2.5" SSD with awesome performance - 240MB/s sustained read and 200MB/s sustained write speeds aimed at the mainstream laptop user - I expect a price around $1K. Pure Silicon (puresi.com) announced a 1TB 2.5" SSD with sustained read speeds of 240MB/s and Sustained write speeds of 215MB/s! So you soon won't have to worry about mechanical failures and obsessively backing up your data. The performance of these drives may allow for higher frame rates on the 645 and 617 if the electronics can keep up, and they could lighten the load by one drive, as RAID will not be needed to get the bandwidth and the capacity is higher than current RED Drive offerings. Another huge benefit is that SSDs use less than half the power of their mechanical counterparts. Any plans on the SSD front Jim?