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Dead Red Raid

Pawel Achtel

Pawel Achtel

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Last week the Red Raid died on me. It is making clicking noises and would not mount on the camera or on a computer.

As luck would have it, it is just after the warranty, so no real complaint here, but more of an advice that I'm looking for.

I assume it is one of the drives that is faulty.

Can I replace the faulty drive or, better still, replace both for a higher capacity?

Has anyone done this successfully? Are there any potential problems associated with such repair?
 
first they have to be matched drives to work at the speed you want, they might not even be labelled inside, second one drive probably did fail, who knows maybe both, there is not replacing the internal drives unless u send it back to Red. i asked around already, there is no swapping ur own drives inside, i wanted to build my own red ram, but apparently Red loads their own firmware on it so that the camera recognizes it, and probably has something to do with both hardware and speed/encoding too. send it back to red for repairs or buy a new 640 gig.
 
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Trouble is that sending the drive both ways would cost about the same as buying replacement drives. I live Downunder.

Also, why should a $100 faulty part cost over $1000 to fix (new drive plus postage plus taxes)?
 
Hey Pawel, just got back from Camera Collective. They successfully have replaced the drives and have a working 640GB made from the original 320.

They said the trick is you have to use absolutely virgin drives. If you format them or even connect them to a computer first, the camera will reject them.
 
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Zakaree Sandberg said:
Toshiba,

open it up and reset the pram.
(most likely wont work if there is some serious clicking issues...but give it a try)
Click to expand...

Thanks Zakaree. Where is the pram located?
 
open up the case (side where the lemo connector, firewire and usb ports are)
be carefull not to pull it apart as the lemo connector is still attached..
Once open, You will see the little reset button on the board. go ahead and press it in.. you can try finger but I would use a wood toothpick of some sort..
 
I have read before people pulling apart the drives and changing them, what could be the harm if it's out of warranty? Sounds like at least one drive is cactus anyway:emote_head_explode:
One of my drives recently had the firewire port fail and RED advised i would have to send it back to be repaired as it could not be done by anyone else. I have no idea why this could be but i did what they said even though it was out of warranty.
 
I just had one repaired...cost of repair was about half of the cost of replacement, but all my data is saved by RED, on their end, and pulled onto a separate drive, so well worth it.
 
It looks like I managed to fix it. :smash: Will do extensive tests before any firm conclusions.
 
Pawel Achtel said:
It looks like I managed to fix it. :smash: Will do extensive tests before any firm conclusions.
Click to expand...

I wouldn't think that a guy who would rip the nose off his 50D for a science experiment would be deterred by a little thing like a snuffed drive...

For the rest of us, yes, RED did a very timely repair on my drive, did the data recovery to a separate drive provided by me, and sent it back, just received it yesterday. Top-notch service.
 
Brent@RED said:
Thanks, Meryem, glad we could help.

BC
Click to expand...

I've had several customer service interactions now, and you all get more efficient and responsive all the time...you would think it might go the other way, considering that you have more cameras delivered every day, but whatever they're putting in the water over there, to keep you all chugging along, well, I need a sip of that!

It was a big relief...when you back out the price of what it would have cost me to have the data recovered by a 3rd-party, it is a relatively inexpensive cure.

...hard to put a price tag on non-repeatable data!
 
Meryem Ersoz said:
I wouldn't think that a guy who would rip the nose off his 50D for a science experiment would be deterred by a little thing like a snuffed drive....
Click to expand...

LOL, yes I like pulling things apart. But, that's me. :smash: I wouldn't recommend this to most operators.

One thing I did learn was that there is more to Red Raid than meets the eye. It is certainly good value for what they sell it for and I will be getting some spare once, for sure.
 
I suppose we shouldn't be surprised. Anyone who voluntarily spends months on a deserted rock with 500 seals as your only company is capable of almost anything! :willy_nilly::willy_nilly::willy_nilly:
 
A drive in the RED Raid died and I replaced the Hitachi 5400 rpm 160GB drives in the red raid with Hitachi 7200 rpm 320GB drives. These were virgin drives, at first the camera hung on initialization, after turning off and resetting the pram the camera did boot but the drive was not recognized.
Finally, I formatted the drive as FAT 32 on the mac and connected it to the camera, the drive was now recognized as a 3rd party CF card (I guess a rather large one) and automatically limited by the camera to 2K.

The drive is now certainly faster than it was before. Any ideas on how to copy any files resident on the remaining operable drive that was part of the raid set, or perhaps cloning from an image of a working 640 drive?
 
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It's not that simple.
I'm not sure if 7200 rpm drives are going to meet the heat, power and compatibility criteria but, in any case, the drives need to be striped on hardware level. Formatting them on your 'puter will not achieve this and, in fact, will prevent it.
You can contact me off line.
 
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