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COOL CAMERA GEAR R2E to ESATA - SHAM OR DOES IT ACTUALY WORK

Nir Shelter

Nir Shelter

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Can any one shed some light on the difficulties behind the Cool Camera Gear R2E to Esata cable malfunction?

I purchased one months ago and have yet to make it work on a single job. It has only worked with 1 Reddrive out of many I have tried it on to date. Other users I have spoken to about this say the same.

I am really frustrated by this as I think it is a great idea, unfortunately so was communism but in reality it doesn't work. It seams rather simple considering the dual Sata pins in the Lemo end of the cable are all that needs to be adapted to the Esata plug and power is supplied by the drive power adapter. Can someone recommend what to do in order to make the cable work?

Thanks for your help,
Nir.
 
When RED started upgrading drives and cables after the build 20 SATA_TRANS_ERROR notification issue, they upped the amount of signal going through the drive cable from the camera to the drive and from the drive to the camera. This works fine when both the camera and the drive know to accept the signal from that range.

The R2E works fine, but when you attach an upgraded drive, it's sending a higher than standard signal to the computer, and most all Esata cards reject that signal. The cable works fine on any non-upgraded 320GB drives and a few early 640GB drives that haven't been upgraded.

I've heard that there is one Esata card that only has PC drivers that will accept the higher signal and works fine, but I have not used it myself.

So in short, there's nothing wrong with the cable, it's the upgraded drives and the Esata card that can't communicate, as the cable is wired correctly. RED has told me that they tested it and it does indeed work fine with the previous spec of the drives.

Before that spec changed I'd used the R2E many many times with no problems.

Hope that helps.

Tim
 
HBAs that like it hot

HBAs that like it hot

If anyone out there can pass along model numbers of eSATA host bus adapters that can handle the higher signal levels that would be very helpful.

Perhaps someone at Cool Camera Gear (who would like to keep selling cables and make their existing customers smile) could research this and report back...

Cheers - #19
 
Dustin Cross said:
Tim is exactly right. Cable works great on older drives that have the SATA_TRANS_FAULT problem, but you really don't want to use those drives.


Dusty
Click to expand...

Those drives worked fine on the Firmware builds that suppressed the SATA_TRANS_FAULT error message. I think Build 21.4.1 was one?
 
Curran Giddens said:
Those drives worked fine on the Firmware builds that suppressed the SATA_TRANS_FAULT error message. I think Build 21.4.1 was one?
Click to expand...

While those drives work fine on the new builds I am concerned with the majority of drives being used currently. Most rental houses have upgraded their drives to fix the SATA_TRANS_FAULT problem. It would stand to reason that as Blair said those who want to keep their customers happy... Would take the initiative and research the cards and Esata to Express 34 adapters that work with the fixed drives.

If any one from Cool Camera Gear could please post a list of compatible cards that would be great and restore my confidence in them. Not to mention would encourage me to recommend others buy their gear...
 
I've worked closely with people from Cool Camera Gear and I will try to find out what that card was that might work in a PC. I know that nothing else I've tested works, since most of the Esata cards are written to the same spec.

There may be some sort of resistor or regulator that might adjust the voltage, but that would likely drive up the price of the cable (which is already not inexpensive) quite a bit.

Again, it seems like there's not much that can be done since the drives are designed to work through the lemo port only inside a closed system. I think the best bet for sata drive offloading at this point is some sort of RED Station module that knows to accept the signal the drive sends.

I'll see what I can find out.

Tim
 
Thanks for the follow up Tim. I will be more than happy to use the Red Station once they are available, in the meantime offloading via eSATA is a pretty big deal in my world (mostly TVCs lately). At the end of the day it really makes producers happy when the transit drives are ready to roll shortly after wrap - just sayin'

Cheers - #19
 
I'm with you. I just worked for 3 weeks on a show that was mainly Red Raids, and I was bummed that they had all been upgraded so I couldn't use the R2E, but at least they worked well on the camera.

Tim
 
Curran Giddens said:
Those drives worked fine on the Firmware builds that suppressed the SATA_TRANS_FAULT error message. I think Build 21.4.1 was one?
Click to expand...

Supressing the error does not fix the problem. There are all kinds of bad things I have seen with non repaired drives. Won't play footage, randomly stop recording, missing frames, etc..... I refuse to use non repaired drives.


Dusty
 
It works great with my 2 drives. I guess they must be older ones... There was just an eSata "upgrade" I had to do when I moved to Snow Leopard. It didn't work at first then, there was some firmware upgrade to do for the eSata xpress card thing I think...

I still don't get it why CCG haven't changed/upgraded their cable for the new drives. THat can't be so hard to make a new cable or something? The transfer rates are so much faster with that cable!

PS: Question: does the cable work with the Red Ram drives?
 
how can I upgrade my drives so they stop throwing that error?
 
I must just have a bad cable then because my drives are original drives, original cables and they work great, never had issues (knock on wood). The R2E cable worked fine for a while, and then at some point, stopped working. Tim, is there a way to send the cable in for analysis? I'd like to use it again at some point.

Thanks!
 
Sorry guys, I got really busy over the last few weeks. I'll try to contact them this week.

For those asking why they haven't updated the cable to work with the upgrade drives, see my posts above, which explain the issue.

Tim
 
Yeah, would be good to know if they might have plans for say a trade-in or possibly no plans at all.

Tim, you said your Lemo worked great in the camera. Are you suggesting that you had it plugged into the camera and then out to a e-sata drive to record? If so, was it a raided drive and was it fast enough?
 
Well cool gear, might be time to chime
in . It was NOT a cheap cable , the least they can do is just answer the question " are you
planning to fix/ upgrade cable or is it
now just trash. We loved the added speed
and I'm sure current owners would pay
a reasonable fee to upgrade if that is
even posible. If not this will be a lesson learned
when buying third party parts, as Red
evolves the other vendors may or may
not be able to keep up. Not blaming coolgear
but if they plan on staying in the game
then it would be great to
know if they can/ cannot remedy this
issue . hopefully they will have a solution
that works for both sides.
 
BajaProductions said:
Yeah, would be good to know if they might have plans for say a trade-in or possibly no plans at all.

Tim, you said your Lemo worked great in the camera. Are you suggesting that you had it plugged into the camera and then out to a e-sata drive to record? If so, was it a raided drive and was it fast enough?
Click to expand...

I wasn't talking about the R2E cable at that point, I was talking about the use of an (essentially) eSATA connection between the camera and the Red drives, meaning the Drive cable.

I have not recorded to non-RED media or even tried as that would be the first thing to be blamed if there was an error.

--

Im not sure if a reasonably priced upgrade or add-on part can be made to work with the R2E cable as it's not their technology that has the problem. The R2E makes the data connection between the Red drive and a 3rd party Esata card possible, and it's the communication between those two that are the problem. To build a solution that is less expensive than the cable was to begin with on that small of a run would seem unlikely to me. That's based purely on my assumptions since I'm not aware of any hardware that would 'legalize' so to speak that esata signal.

I've been on set every day this past week and will be for the next few months but I'll try to get ahold of them sometime coming up.

Tim
 
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