an oldie but goodie - failed RED Drive

[Michael Morlan]

This is one to add to your storage of RED One knowledge:

This week, my camera package was on an out-of-town rental while I was on another set. Wouldn't you know - it chose that time to have a meltdown. I received panicked calls from the producer and A/C that one or both drives wouldn't mount, were suffering intermittent fails and otherwise stopping their shoot cold. I suspected the build 21 beta might be at fault and, fortunately, the A/C had a build 20 on his laptop. Interestingly, one of the drives would mount with the upgrade and we downgraded to 20. Everything seemed fine then more panicked calls. "Send a RED body and two drives down here right now!"

Long story, short - I got another camera/drives on their set at considerable expense but this could have been avoided altogether.

I’d heard (but forgotten until this evening) there is a small problem with RED Drives – an internal circuit board that bridges the headers between RAID controller and the two drives can become loose – especially if the drive suffers some shock like being dropped on its front – and the connections between drives and controller lost. Fortunately, the circuit board lies just underneath the front end cap and can easily be reseated by the user (although I don’t think that’s a warranted repair.) I reseated the board, ran multiple unmount/mount/format/record cycles on both mags and they are working flawlessly again.

I'm going to add a bit of non-conductive foam inside the cap to help keep the board seated from now on. (I remember someone writing about that fix as well.)

If your drive is out of warranty, it can't hurt to take a peak under the hood and see if this is a latent failure waiting to haunt your set.

Michael

 

[Julio Quintana]

Thanks for posting Michael. As awesome as it is to have the long recording times, the RED drives are definitely the scariest part of the whole camera system.

 

[ericyoung]

Nice post Michael - helpful as always!

 

[Larry McKee]

Thanks, Michael. Valuable info.

 

[PaulClements]

Additional Info

Additional Info

Another point to add here is that if one drive has this happen to it and you try to mount that drive to the camera it won't recognise it (Of course). However, if you then try to put a good drive on the camera it STILL won't recognise it. You have to reboot completely before it will do so. If you don't have this bit of info to hand it's very simple to think that you either have multiple broken drives or there is a cable problem or a firmware problem or even a connection problem on the rear of the camera. The fact is that the drive that is temporarily broken has made the camera require a reboot before another drive can be accepted, that's all.

Cheers
Paul

 

[Michael Morlan]

Right Paul. We experienced exactly that symptom - nothing mounted after failed drive was attempted.

M

 

[rod bradley]

Thank you both for this valuable heads up advice!

 

[Rich Schaefer]

Both killer tips! Thanks Much!