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  • 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 :)

LEMO to (e)SATA Cable?

Paul Leeming

Paul Leeming

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Does anyone out there want to sell me a LEMO to (e)SATA cable to use with the RedDrive for rapid data offload?

I'm looking for immediate delivery for a special project I'm working on..... :ninja:

Thanks in advance!

Paul
 
I'd love to see this as well... haven't seen anyone offer one so far though.

Anyone making this conversion cable yet?

Maybe PanaTech?


Alex
 
The FW800 port on many red drive stops working for some reason. A Lemo to sata cable would be incredible useful. I wich red would reconsider giving the pin-out to those who know what thay are doing. ;)
 
Cail Young said:
FW800 isn't fast enough? I can get 75MB/s or so out of it writing to a RAID stripe set...
Click to expand...
The "special project" I mentioned is hardware related so no, in this case FW800 isn't anywhere near fast enough!! :wink:

Seriously though, is there NO ONE out there willing or able to sell one of these things? Simon Baechler seems to have one on his on-set backup rig, but my PM to him went unanswered so I'm opening the call up to all.

Thanks,

Paul
 
I've also wanted this cable. RED Does not plan to mfg. it and they will not give out the pin
configuration to my Tech as it is proprietary. Unless someone sets out to reverse engineer it we are just outa luck.
 
This topic has been beat to death already.

There are no speed benefits to connecting the drive via SATA. ~75MB/s is peak performance for the drive units inside the RED RAID and that can be sustained with FW800.

I'll agree that it would be nice to have an eSATA connectivity option on the drives via a proper adapter cable or even future drive units with an eSATA port. All just for the sake of convenience. But since RED is not officially supplying the pin-out for making such a cable, I don't think too many people will be jumping up to make one. Or at least not on the record.

Paul, if you have a "special project", have you contacted RED about it? The only situation I can think of where the FW800 isn't going to be fast enough in relation to the RED DRIVE is if you're trying to RAID multiple RED DRIVEs together or trying to offload multiple units via a single interface or something and need much larger bandwidth for the collective interface.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Paul, if you have a "special project", have you contacted RED about it? The only situation I can think of where the FW800 isn't going to be fast enough in relation to the RED DRIVE is if you're trying to RAID multiple RED DRIVEs together or trying to offload multiple units via a single interface or something and need much larger bandwidth for the collective interface.
Click to expand...
Your thinking is certainly in the right direction! :ninja:

As stated above, as I understood it Red aren't giving users the pin out for some reason. I am in contact with Red on this project as I'm seeking a way to get full recording bandwidth out of camera for it, which is currently limited to the non-Red approved CF card paradigm of 2K max..... and no, we aren't testing CF cards in this photo..... :whistling:

IMG_0622s.jpg


Cheers,

Paul
 
Simon Baechler is on job and is hard to get hold of, but the pinout I guess is under NDA, so you probably do better mailing RED and describing your project.
 
Connecting the RED DRIVE using eSATA removes the burden on the FW800 bus. There are times [like on multi-camera RED DRIVE shoots that are dumping only to FW800 drives] where such a cable is very desirable.

They're a huge pain in the butt to make, as the RED DRIVE cables have all sorts of grounded shielding to deal with. But it is possible.

If somebody started making these cables en masse, they'd make a fortune.
 
Yep, that would be a very nice christmas gift from red :) A cable like that would probably cost $200 in just lemo stuff, but would be very, very good and a huge time saver. In theory FW800 is fast enough, but in production sata are much faster.
 
ive been asking for the pinout for literally years now with no luck.

also for what it seems like you are doing, i have a feeling you are going to run into a lot of problems with optimizing the realtime transfer of the files through a secondary cpu.
maybe wrong? eh
id like to know the pinouts so i can plug a red drive straight into my computer with esata for transfer
 
RyanKunkleman said:
ive been asking for the pinout for literally years now with no luck.
Click to expand...

Ummm....
i wonder if on the other side of that lemo socket on the Red body there is a sata cable very similiar to the sata cable that plugs into the CF reader board?
D
 
While we're talking warranties...how long is the warranty...1-3 years?
D
 
Brook Willard said:
Connecting the RED DRIVE using eSATA removes the burden on the FW800 bus. There are times [like on multi-camera RED DRIVE shoots that are dumping only to FW800 drives] where such a cable is very desirable.
Click to expand...

...Or they could dump to eSATA drives, keeping the RED media on the FW bus. Or use an additional FW800 controller in their Macbook's EC34 slot. eSATA and FW800 ExpressCards are standard kit for any competent DIT, IMO.

They're a huge pain in the butt to make, as the RED DRIVE cables have all sorts of grounded shielding to deal with. But it is possible.
Click to expand...

And void warranties and impose additional risk. Oh, Deanan already brought that up. Yeah, considering I can have a nice CalDigit or Sonnet eSATA card and a nice FW800 card, plus a selection of cables, to go along with my MBP for less than half the cost of a RED Drive cable, seems a no-brainer.

Sorry to pick at ya, Brook... Your post just seemed like a good one to quote. It's just this request seems to come around every 30 days like a broken record. eSATA to RED Drive LEMO cable is not going to increase performance. It's not an endorsed RED solution. Other simple and practical options exist for notebook PC / Macbook Pro owners. If you're rolling a Mac Pro around on a cart, even better, it comes stock with two FW800 busses to begin with. And most people add eSATA of some sort first thing when unboxing a Mac Pro.
 
Deanan said:
And void warranties both on cameras and drives en masse.
Click to expand...

Why does it need to be that way? The LEMO connector is based on eSATA, the drives ship with power adapters... what's the issue? It's just another way to get data off of the drives. If the cables were up to snuff, couldn't you guys approve them?

I'm not talking about recording to nonstandard media... I'm just talking about downloading from RED DRIVEs to a computer with an eSATA cable.

I didn't realize building such a cable would void warranties - this is the first of these threads I've participated in.


Jeff Kilgroe said:
If you're rolling a Mac Pro around on a cart, even better, it comes stock with two FW800 busses to begin with.
Click to expand...

I wish...

Mac Pro Computers (January 2008)
The Mac Pro computers with Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400 Series microprocessors were introduced in January 2008. The Mac Pro provides two FireWire 800 IEEE 1394b ports and two FireWire 400 IEEE 1394a ports. The four FireWire ports are on the same FireWire bus and share a single 12V DC-regulated power supply that can provide 18 W per port, for up to 28 W total. If a device is added that exceeds the power limit, the port will be disabled but the other ports will continue to function. Unplug the device, and the disabled port will recover in a short amount of time. FireWire port power is provided when the computer is on, in sleep, or off.
Click to expand...

From here.

I agree that there are other solutions in the mean time. I have two FW800 cards and an eSATA card that I swap in and out of my DIT machine along with its SAS card, K3 and Decklink. My laptop also has the requisite eSATA and FW800 EX34 cards. I just configure myself to a given job.

As an example, my current show has me dumping to two FW800 G-RAID minis [which don't currently have eSATA in the shipping models] and my 3xSAS RAID. Those little drives go back and forth to editorial 3x daily. It's easy to keep up because we don't shoot a lot, but there's always room for "better". :)

It sure would be nice to have one more way to do it. :) No offense taken at all.
 
Brook Willard said:
....But it sure would be nice to have one more way to do it.
Click to expand...

How prolific are failing FW800 ports?

I very much understand going out of bounds on design should void warranty.
But I also wouldn't blame anyone for wanting a fast fall back solution incase the RedDrive FW800 fails or FW800 isn't available.
As a PC user, FW800 isn't the most common of ports/solutions. Also it's so nice to stick my esata Nexto CF backup into the Esata port and there it is.
Finally as always I bet Red listens to customers .

Dave
 
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