Modding the Red Flash Drive

[hasaanchop]

Howdy, newbie here, still waiting for the funds to get my own Red camera system, but I was wondering about something.

Could you take the Red Flash Drive and upgrade it with something like this: http://www.ewiz.com/detail.php?name=FSD56GC25H? You would then have a capacity of a half a terabyte in storage space. Mod two of the drives with this combo for on-set capability of a terabyte of shooting ability.

Granted the price is exorbitant, but then again you're also talking a 8-fold increase in your storage space.

And as we see flash memory start to come down in price, down the line also makes this proposition look especially good.

So is this even possible? The more user-friendly this camera is to mods and tweaks, the more excited I think I will get over it. Thanks for any information anyone can help with.

 

[hasaanchop]

So out of all the people that have read this post, not a single answer?

Is there anyone that can answer this simple question? Basically, how proprietary are the drives? If it's a simple interface, I would think the size of the drive wouldn't matter.

Can anyone address this?

 

[Matthew Lochman]

patience is a virtue.

when you get your RED try it out and let us know.

 

[Jeff Brue]

check the read writes (number of times the disk can be rewritten completely) of that type of flash drive and you may be unpleasently disappointed in that particular flash technology.

 

[Ryan Patch]

if you've yet to get your money together, I would bet by the time your money is in and your order is up, RED will have cooked up something even more special than you can think of. With the promise that the EPIC will be able to record 100mb/sec REDCODE, they will have to be bringing larger solutions soon anyway.

Also, do you really need something with more storage capacity? Carrying around more than 64GB of RED ONE footage seems to put all of that footage at a lot of risk- why aren't you offloading more often. Perhaps you're shooting doc- then get a RED RAID.

RED has consistently demonstrated that they are on top of the technology and aren't interested with sticking us with outdated gear or locking us into technology that's not the absolute best that can be supported at the time. Call me a drone (or a true believer) but... it's true.

 

[hasaanchop]

check the read writes (number of times the disk can be rewritten completely) of that type of flash drive and you may be unpleasently disappointed in that particular flash technology.

Endurance:
* Read: Unlimited
* Write/Erase: >140 years @ 50GB write-erase /day

Sounds pretty stable to me. Is there something that I am missing?

BTW, I can't find a single specification on RED's site for any minimum read/write speeds for any of their three recording systems.

Honestly I think that a $5k SSD flash drive is going to be pretty darn reliable. And they're only going to get cheaper.

I do plan to offload often and backup even more often. It's cool that the LTO Ultrium 4 DLT drives can now backup up to 800GB.

 

[David Wyatt]

Obviously most people would be nervous about keeping that amount of footage on one drive (be it hard-drive or flash drive) before it was backed-up in case something unforseen happened to the camera or drive. If you're planning on backing up as you go along you'll need two drives so you can carry on filming while you back up (so double the price which is getting into expensive territory just for the luxury of huge storage which isn't really necessary if you're backing up as you go along, which is the safest method - plus if you don't back-up as you go along some poor soul has to do hours of backing up at the end of the shoot day!)

I think modding anything like this is dubious with Red, especially since the firmware is changing all the time - see this post about it by Deanan:

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=16291&page=3

Apparently Red's own flash drive is about to hit the streets which is cheaper (less storage admittedly but that's kind of irrelevant if you're backing up as you go along like you should be doing), and it's guaranteed to actually work with the camera & firmware revisions (there's speculation that it may be able to achieve higher frame rates in 4K too but we'll have to see).