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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 :)

EPIC -> Thunderbolt (question for RED)

Mike 'Fireman' Ross

Mike 'Fireman' Ross

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Guys,

A few months ago RED announced that they had decided to can the announced SATA interface module for EPIC/Scarlet that would have allowed the use of RED Drive etc. - fair enough, and they were more than generous in offering the SSD trade-in deal.

Now with Thunderbolt, and Thunderbolt RAIDs etc, a whole lot of other storage options will open up. Have RED considered producing a Thunderbolt interface module for EPIC/Scalet? Is anyone aware of a 3rd party company considering such a module?

What do folks think of that idea?

Mike
 
Looking forward to Thunderbolt I/O on next generation Red Stations.
In terms of fast pipes for camera modules, fiber seems like the obvious candidate and that might include Thunderbolt over fiber.

Red Drives have been EOL'd for a reason, too slow and a perception of reliability issues.

Cheers - #19
 
this has been covered a few times already, but again, just because you have a faster connection doesn't mean you'll get better speeds from the SSD's. they are 3g sata based SSD's, and RED has qualified them somewhere in the mide 200 mb/sec read and write. having a 10g port isn't gonna make that go any faster than it already can. and if they come out with new speed ssd, and it's 6g sata, that's still only max 600 mb/sec, and can still be accomplished with a 6g esata. so the big benefit from thunderbolt is to connect a big raid to offload faster with cheaper spinning disc media, and hopefully one day esata fan out cables or hubs so that you could possible offload multiple red mags at once to a really fast raid.

there literally is not point in having a thunderbolt red station unless the media starts being able to read and write past 600 mb/sec.
 
Tom.Wong said:
there literally is not point in having a thunderbolt red station unless the media starts being able to read and write past 600 mb/sec.
Click to expand...

Actually a point I can think of is, for MBP laptops, you apparently can't run the Express34 slot and Thunderbolt port at the same time, so if you can daisy-chain the SSD card reader on Thunderbolt it would be good.
 
The RED Station unit and the RED SSD media are all built on 3Gbps SATA at the moment. Adding Thunderbolt to it won't speed it up.

Future media could be built on 6Gbps SATA or other faster interface standards, which could take advantage of Thunderbolt and other new tech coming along.

I'd really like to see dual Thunderbolt ports on the next Macbook Pro. One TB port could host 3 x 6Gbps eSATA ports at full speed, for example. There are several Thunderbolt to eSATA adapters due here shortly from different manufacturers. This will allow us to connect one or two RED Station modules as well as one or two storage devices on which to offload to.

Thunderbolt in its current form has dual 10Gbps channels in one connector. As per the spec, Intel recommends that each device restrict itself to operating on one channel if it is designed to allow daisy-chaining or display pass-through. But some devices, such as PCIe expanders, high speed interface adapters and performance RAIDs will be able to utilize all 20Gbps for an effective 1600MB/s. So far, all the Thunderbolt devices I have seen announced, with the exception of a couple PCIe expansion units and one multi-port 6Gbps eSATA adapter, are all designed to operate on a single 10Gbps channel.

As for RED's SSD's. Read speeds are in the upper 200MB/s, which suggest they are capable of saturating the 3Gbps connection for reads, or at least coming close. Writes are slower.

joe hedge said:
Actually a point I can think of is, for MBP laptops, you apparently can't run the Express34 slot and Thunderbolt port at the same time, so if you can daisy-chain the SSD card reader on Thunderbolt it would be good.
Click to expand...

Er... Who told you that? I had a prototype Thunderbolt drive enclosure here for a bit and I copied plenty of stuff from an eSATA HDD via an ExpressCard eSATA adapter over to the Thunderbolt enclosure. That would be, like, stupid if it didn't work. Unless I'm missing something and it has since been disabled in firmware due to some other reason (power, etc..).

That said, Thunderbolt on RED Station would be good for daisy-chaining, but as of now, all the media is SATA-based. So you would be looking at more expensive hardware to have a Thunderbolt interface plus PCIe to eSATA bridge in each RED Station module. Like I've said a bunch of times before, the killer app here is a Thunderbolt to 4x eSATA adapter.
 
Last edited:
joe hedge said:
"One new bit of information from the series of answers is a possible drawback for high-end Macbook Pro users: A PCI Express Card in the Express Card slot cannot be operated if the system is connected to a Thunderbolt device. Apple recommends disconnecting the device if you are going to use the Express Slot."

http://www.appleinsider.com/article...ing_speeds_with_bootable_external_drives.html
Click to expand...

OK... I'll take that with a pound of salt for now. Cuz, like I said, it worked for me here. I've actually done it, unless something has changed, but there's been no new firmware/SMC updates in the mean time that I'm aware of. That and there's no reference to any such restriction in any of Apple's documentation, nor is it in the transcript of the Q&A session that AppleInsider references -- complete transcript doesn't seem to be available, though, just the 10 questions and subsequent commentary. If something has changed in the last 60 days, since I was deprived of my Thunderbolt beta enclosure, then Apple will have some serious backlash on their hands. Just as bad, if not worse, than the whole FCPx deal. ...Smells like a good argument for class-action if you ask me. And that would be sad. :( Every pro shooting R3D, SxS and P2 media would want to grab iSteve by the short and curlies.

I'll have my 6-bay Pegasus Thunderbolt unit here in about a week. I guess we'll see....
 
I have downloaded Red SSDs via Red Station over eSATA to both Mac and Win7 writing to fast (600MB/sec+) RAIDs and never been able to exceed 150MB/sec.

It was my supposition that the added headroom of the Thunderbolt spec might actually allow me to get closer to the max read speed of the Red SSDs.

Would love to know the top speeds others have achieved and the topology of their rigs in hopes I can get into the mid-200s. Thanks in advance.

Cheers - #19
 
Fastest I can get out of them is around 280MB/s, which is about the maximum of the 3Gbps SATA interface they use. I'm not sure why Blair is only getting 150MB/s out of his... I've only benchmarked my 256GB ones, not the 128's, but I can sustain well into the 200+MB/s range for reads. Writes are slower, but still quite fast.

I'll re-do some benchmarks soon and post.
 
Hey Blair,

I too am seeing faster speeds than you report.

Using a 2011 17" MBP via the ExpressCard 34 slot, using a SeriTek/6G card, I'm seeing about 115 MB/s write and 215 MB/s read speeds from RED SSD media connected through RED Station.

I can also verify that this configuration works fine when connected to a Thunderbolt raid.

I started a new thread on the Promise TB raid as there are several threads scattered around that mention it.

http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?60811-Promise-R6-Thunderbolt-Raid-Array-First-Impressions

Hope this helps,

Steve
 
Stephen Lovett said:
Hey Blair,

Using a 2011 17" MBP via the ExpressCard 34 slot, using a SeriTek/6G card, I'm seeing about 115 MB/s write and 215 MB/s read speeds from RED SSD media connected through RED Station.

I can also verify that this configuration works fine when connected to a Thunderbolt raid.

Steve
Click to expand...

Good news!
 
Interesting discussion but we've drifted a fair way from my original question, which no-one really picked up on: anyone think there's any mileage in a Thunderbolt rear module for EPIC/Scarlet, for recording to larger capacity external media, either by RED or 3rd party solutions?

I'm thinking how neat it would be to have a RED RAID Mark 2... something like a 768GB RAID 5 array of 4 x 256GB 1.8" SSDs in something just a little bigger than a cigarette packet for instance; hooked up to the EPIC via Thunderbolt.

I think that's a runner.

Mike
 
Tom.Wong said:
that's still only max 600 mb/sec, and can still be accomplished with a 6g esata.
Click to expand...


The thing is that most editors computers (We all know, most are Mac or Macbooks.) they don't come with e-sata.

Now almost the hole family of Macs have the thunderbolt port. It's only missing in the Mac Pro, but speculations says that will come out later august with the new Mac Pro line.

It would be extremely nice if we could have e-sata, thunderbolt and usb3 on the Red Stations. But if all of this is too much, at least the USB3 and the Thunderbolt. Why? USB3 is very fast (slowest then e-sata ok) but now most computers are coming with USB3 ports, and for the Macs (the most used by us all, and still in the USB2) they could get the most with the Thunderbolt.

but that's just my opnion
 
Currently whats available is a 10G TB which can only become handy for daisy chaining source and destination media on the one bus for offloading, other wise, it will not (as mentioned) present a performance increase. In order to take advantage of this Red would have to invest a lot of time and money in developing and qualifying hardware for a "new" TB and or USB3 i/o Red station and by the time it is ready for the market we would be closer to TB100G being released at which point people will be asking; “why are we using that old TB10G Redstations...?”

The point is that currently based on 3G SATA protocol both Red media and backup storage, if SSD or HDD in a fast raid, wont exceed 300MB/s less over head, which is plenty. Sure we always try to improve our offload systems but practically it is not yet viable to develop a TB + USB 3 version Redstation not until 6G SATA media is readily available any how, and even then it would be faster and cheaper for Red to swap the 3G e-SATA ports with 6G than to design and test TB+USB3 port Redstations.

More so most of us very often use Macpros on set now days and PCI-E X16 is 64G which will easily let you use a 4 X e-SATA fan out on one SATA channel via a PCI-E expansion card. Logic bares that if you get now a 6G SATA enabled expansion card (with 2 or 4 channels on it eg; Atto H6F0) you would be future proofed for a 6G SATA upgrade. Other wise to use TB or USB 3 with a Macpro you would have to wait for and BUY a new Macpro with TB ports wait for and BUY another set of Redstations that will once again present no performance increase over a 6G e-SATA Redstation.

As for the original question of this thread sorry Mike off load geeks hijacked the thread.
The question of large capacity recording mediums keeps coming up with each new gen recording media and camera. No matter the mediums used or as “safe” as they may be considered I will always off load a card, drive or raid from the camera as often as possible with out interfering with camera work. This means that if the drive is at 5% capacity, the next setup is massive and camera is standing by I will reload. Ideally drives at 10% capacity and CF recording time less one scene length. I have never and will never let a camera roll on more than 50% capacity when recording to drive and then only at the most extreme of situations and to the lack of other options. So having larger capacity recording mediums than 320GB wont give us anything in my opinion.
 
Call me a Giant naysayer - but my prediction is Thunderbolt is DOA as a mainstream professional connection within two years.

I don't trust it.

I wouldn't trust my film with it yet.

I'm sure this sounds absurd to some of you, but I'm going to stand by this.
 
While I like bleeding edge technology for a lot of things, I think Apple is trying too hard to force-feed certain things - and this is one of them. I have a hunch there are some ECC things that aren't quite what they should be, and I think daisy chaining on a serial bus is dangerous at best. Again, some people may think I'm nuts - but 8 out of 10 problems I see stem from incorrect management of a serial bus (wide generalization). Beyond that, it's a "Hunch"
 
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