Developing 4 Bay RAID Box for RED users

[James Liu]

Hi everyone! I am James from CineRAID systems. We specialize in digital media storage, recording and editing systems. With the rise of RED heads, we are developing a RED compatible and reliable hardware RAID storage particularly for on-site uses. Notice I mentioned this product is still in development so this item not on sale just yet. The reason I am posting here is because we'd like to get inputs from the RED community regarding such product and whats a better way than learning it from here!

A brief description of this RAID box is that it will mainly be composed of 4 bay SATA drives (ranging from 2TB to 8TB of total RAW storage), an integrated CF slot, and a hardware RAID controller with eSATA/USB interface (connected to a laptop). The RAID volume can be configured to either a 0, 1, 5 or 6 upon preference. In addition, the box will come equipped with a software that helps managing/copying RAW data from your CF card to any other volume with checksum being done at the same time. We have just recently made our first debut of the box's prototype at the LA REDucation last week and we are surprised by the numerous positive responses we received.

By joining this forum, we hope to become more connected to the RED community as it could aid us in providing quality solutions. All of your inputs in this post will be forwarded and discussed by our engineering team each week. I will also update the post with recent development and changes. Thank you very much :smile:

more info: http://www.cineraid.com/4bayCF.htm

 

[Simon Blackledge]

Looks like a good idea.

Are the CineGrade and CineRecorder shipping then?

s

 

[Kwan Khan]

Welcome to Reduser ... James

Price Range please...

 

[J. Bernard Vallon]

It'd be invaluable if you made a version out of 2.5 inch drives and the whole thing could be powered by a battery. We have some powerful batteries at our disposal. If I could slap a red brick on the side of it and power it for 4 hours id bring one to every job.

 

[James Liu]

Thanks for the reponse guy. I really appreciate it

Looks like a good idea.

Are the CineGrade and CineRecorder shipping then?

s

The CineGrade and CineRecorder are already in production. The CineRecorder is not really applicable for RED One as it uses RED drive or CF card so I will not talk about that here. The CineGrade is compatible with R3D and is mainly powered by SpeedGrade from Iridas, to stay on topic I'll send you more info in a pm instead.

Welcome to Reduser ... James

Price Range please...

Please note the price is still preliminary as this box is still in works. But for now you can expect something around twenty five hundred. It will most likely go up by the time it is being released but it will definitely be limited below 3k as we are trying hard not to overshoot the cost while keeping performance and reliability as a priority.

It'd be invaluable if you made a version out of 2.5 inch drives and the whole thing could be powered by a battery. We have some powerful batteries at our disposal. If I could slap a red brick on the side of it and power it for 4 hours id bring one to every job.

The battery is a great idea! We could definitely look into something like that as 'accessories' to go with the box. We are testing with the standard AC right now as it will be connect to a laptop and most likely you will have an AC for that as well. We have considered the 2.5 inch drives when we started but decided not to go with it because a 2.5 inch usually offer substantial less performance with a higher price tag compare to a 3.5. Since we are having four drives in a box, we recommend users to use a RAID 5 or 6 for good level of data protection against drive failure instead of RAID 0 which has no storage redundancy for protection what so ever. For RAID 5/6 configuration, the 3.5 inch out performs in every aspect. As a result we don't have plan now for the 2.5 drives but hey! after we are done with this one, we can always release a different box as its smaller brother and have the 2.5 for extreme portability! Thank you for the idea, I will be taking all the credits! lol. :biggrin:

 

[James Liu]

To satisfy people who crave performance numbers
(people like me who achieve orgasm by running riduculous high benchmark numbers)
Here are a few screenshots of tests recently performed on the prototype.
The setup used for the box is 4 x WD Enterprise 1TB RE3 HDD through eSATA to Mac PRO in RAID5 or RAID0 configuration. The benchmark is AJA System Test running 2GB of data in 1920x1080 10bit RGB.

We are hoping to achieve enough speed to stream R3D directly from the RAID volume with FCP. But to do such test, I wanted to ask if there is anyone here around LA Area has 30 to 60GB of unimportant R3D footage they could kindly donate to us for testing? You help will be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

 

[Tom.Wong]

2.5 inch will also accommodate SSD storage too better without having to use 3.5 inch enclosures, less power draw, and heat. does the cf card reader allow for backup without the use of a computer? and it would also be amazing if there was a separate fw 800 bus or esata bus built in just offload red drive so you can get 3 gb speed direct transfers into the device.

all in all, great ideas, and looking forward to your production line!

 

[James Liu]

Currently, a laptop is required to be connected for all operation. I get what you mean having able to directly off-load CF or RED drive content into the RAID. It would be sweet but will require a seperate processing unit that does the job (another bump up in cost) The price will probably be too heavy for such feature to be implemented. I'll definitely forward it to my heads. The 2.5 inch option is currently being discussed by our engineers though.

The 3GB speed is exciting but hardly achievable primarily by the limitation of the RED drives capabilities. Since we are assuming the user will have a laptop handy when using our box, they can simply hook up the red drive to the laptop through FW and backup to the RAID with our software. (performance is still yet to be tested though)

 

[Nick Shaw]

Very interesting product. I know eSATA is ideal, but for connection flexibility it would be useful to have FW800 as well (2 ports to loop through to a Red Drive). Since USB-2 tends to run very slowly on a Mac, it ends up being an emergency only connection.

 

[Gabriele Turchi]

guys would be possible to develop a machine like that computer independent that can backup RedDrive and CF card?...that would be soo useful...

g

 

[Michael Totten]

Is there a rack-mountable version and a raid card for a MacPro configuration?

 

[James Liu]

Very interesting product. I know eSATA is ideal, but for connection flexibility it would be useful to have FW800 as well (2 ports to loop through to a Red Drive). Since USB-2 tends to run very slowly on a Mac, it ends up being an emergency only connection.

Its one of those difficult design decision we have to make when we first began brainstorming the product. We were aiming for a portable true hardware RAID box. (Being powered with hardware RAID would effectively seperate us from all other competitors in the market) However, in order to best put the hardware RAID to use, eSATA is more ideal compare to FW. As for now, if we wanted to stream R3D directly from RAID with FCP, we'd need the performance of an eSATA. But from the huge suggestion pool demanding for FW... I am beginning to have second thoughts. Maybe we will just have all of them!! (cost goes up again though, I am sorry I keep mentioning cost but you know its a big deal)

guys would be possible to develop a machine like that computer independent that can backup RedDrive and CF card?...that would be soo useful...

Most people I know carry their laptop with them everywhere so we haven't put too much thought into it. (A laptop is require to perform backup and checksum) Futhermore, you will be given the option to review or offline edit the content with FCP by streaming from the box so you will need a laptop as well. To backup RED drive you could connect the drive to a laptop through FW and works the same as backing up CF.

Is there a rack-mountable version and a raid card for a MacPro configuration?

Its wierd that you asked, because we were just talking about having a rack-mount version last week (4bay and 8bay) and we begin to look at how feasible to integrate our existing 4 bay box prototype into a slimmer rackmount this week. We want to make a rackmount with the same hardware RAID that is pretty much plug and play without installing any other cards and integrated with CF slots like the prototype here. We do carry what you are looking for right now though. (I will send you a pm instead)


To all,
Thank you very much guys. I am getting so much feedback and ideas I think we can skip gen. 1.0 and go directly to gen 2.0. LOL :smilielol5:
Lets keep them coming!

 

[Gabriele Turchi]

Most people I know carry their laptop with them everywhere so we haven't put too much thought into it. (A laptop is require to perform backup and checksum) Futhermore, you will be given the option to review or offline edit the content with FCP by streaming from the box so you will need a laptop as well. To backup RED drive you could connect the drive to a laptop through FW and works the same as backing up CF.

well what i suggested would be sooo useful for every smaller shooting when the DIT is also the camera assistant and also you shoot around all day without table or time...

trust me i as DIT i dream for that kind of product all the time...and you cannot believe about how many commercial are shooted in hurry without even have look at the footage until the day after....in all that kind of situation having a box that does that is way more useful than a laptop ...
the Nexto extreme does that , but have limited storage....and does not power up the Red drive...


my 2 cent


g

 

[James Liu]

well what i suggested would be sooo useful for every smaller shooting when the DIT is also the camera assistant and also you shoot around all day without table or time...

trust me i as DIT i dream for that kind of product all the time...and you cannot believe about how many commercial are shooted in hurry without even have look at the footage until the day after....in all that kind of situation having a box that does that is way more useful than a laptop ...
the Nexto extreme does that , but have limited storage....and does not power up the Red drive...


my 2 cent


g

Wow. very valid points, I am sold. I will definitely forward your suggestion at the table. I think the engineers are gonna hate me and become even busier after they learned this.

 

[Gabriele Turchi]

trust me...many many shooting use the laptop only to backup ...and when you shoot around all day is not comfortable...having a little raid box that you can plug to the drive and press a button would be soo useful...(for example even in a car going from a location to another...)

g

 

[Tom.Wong]

being a DIT myself i can concur with that. there are a LOT of shoots where there no place, no time, no many power to set up a whole station, i usually have to force myself in a corner somewhere and yell for a stinger to be run to me. and some ppl have full DIT carts, but they don't work in a lot of situations either, they are best for full studio use or on huge productions. on a smaller music video where we are jumping locations every 4 hours, it becomes increasingly difficult.

and bandwidth on a MBP gets clogged up really fast, with a fw 800 bus that splits in half when u hook up more then one thing, and 1 expresscard slot when i wish i had 6, the solution for a self contained raid device that acts as just a offload "sled" would truly be a blessing. whether it just be cf, or red drive, u just hook it up, and it will offload, and verify with checksums with minimal bandwidth clogs. then u can hook up a computer to it on down time and start checking all ur footage and do redundants.

it's great that you guys are actually asking us what would be great in this solution, and taking our feedback straight to the design. i know cost matters, but the added convienance, usefulness, and broad application use i think will make people ignore a portion of the price tag and see how much it will benefit their work.

thanks for all ur hard work!

 

[James Liu]

Thank you guys for the quality information. I appreciate it.

 

[James Liu]

To generally cover couple points mentioned and discussed in our last friday's meeting with the engineers and heads

- laptop independent while backup (a bump up in cost but a strongly desirable feature, engineers are looking into ways to best integrate it)
- FW option (doable but not a priority for now, maybe in 2.0)
- battery for isolated operation (biggest barrier, as our 4bay eats a lot of power to deliver performance, might not survive 40mins of use even with a giant battery pack the same size of the box, making the system less practicle/portable)
- rackmount version of the system will most likely to be developed when we are completed with the current prototype (possible in 4/8/16 bay variation)

I'd like to thank all the people providing the quality comments. Please let us know what your thoughts are (or even words for encouragement) it would make us smile and push the project going. :biggrin5:
Thank you

 

[James Liu]

Hi everyone,
Its been a while and I thought I'd give everyone an update. We are currently implementing the box to perform backup (CF/REDrive to RAID 5) without laptop/PC attached. The box will be an 3+1. Meaning that there are 3 slots of 3.5'' 1 or 2 TB drives for hardware RAID 5 setup and 1 slot for CF card or REDrive adaptor. All four slots will be hot-swappable so you can customize the box to fit more or less drives/adaptors. There will be a small LCD and few buttons on the box to display a simple GUI for simple backup commands and volume capacity information. A bit by bit comparison is used to ensure datas are being copied accurately.

At the same time, I'd like to throw a question to the crowd for survey purposes only. How much are you guys willing to pay for a box like this? We believe this tool will become popular among RED users and DITs but the R&D ramp up cost quickly. Obviously everybody prefer the least dollar paid but I am hoping we can get some honest figures so hopefully we can expect some kind of profit if this goes into production. LOL hmy:

 

[Solomon Schechman]

Can you go into more detail about the drives/adaptors being hot swappable? I think it would be interesting if this was red station compatible, obviously thats hard to do because it doesn't exist yet but I thought I would still throw it out there. Also I just wanted to say I am really interested in this product however I am not sure what I would be willing to pay for it yet.