Handle With Care: Red (raid) Drive

[Brook Willard]

Perhaps Red is using some kind of special mil-spec fighter-jet hard drives?

Nah, they're off-the-shelf 5400RPM drives.

Don't get me wrong, the RED DRIVE definitely works and I haven't seen any problems with it so far [beyond dropping frames in the kinds of situation where a drive just shouldn't be used...]. It's a good product and there are a lot of places where it's going to be perfect. I'm just terrified of spinning media on a camera.

 

[Steve Sherrick]

I know they tested them pretty extensively at RED, but I do have to say that your revelation is quite surprising to me. I thought I had posted something way back when about the need to make sure the drives were internally shock absorbed (using the Sound Devices as an example). I also felt that externally they needed to be suspended, so they are floating rather than hard mounted. Wish I could find that thread, although it doesn't matter at this point. I'll see how my tests go and maybe I'll go as far as to use one as a test model for experiementing with shock absorbing the drive.

My hope was that they are good enough for the average shooting situation where you need to run long takes and CF would handle the rough stuff. I just have to see where that line is now.

 

[Dylan Reeve]

That's ridiculous - Ikegami had rubber shock mounts in their drives 10 years ago - same kind of laptop drives and very robust. That's just obvious - wasn't anybody thinking about this stuff?

You shouldn't need solid state for any normal bumps and scrapes - a reasonably cushioned laptop drive should work very well.

I believe Ikegami also make fairly substantial use of pre-write buffering to provide shock proctection. Although I've never seen or used their EditCam, so I could be wrong.

 

[zak forrest]

I've been shooting a feature with Red drives since late January. It's almost entirely handheld, never had a single dropped frame. Even when we are done with a shot and we keep the camera rolling as we "violently" take the camera off the operator (or me) and set it on the ground, hop in a car with it in a lap, jump off a chain link fence while rolling... never had a dropped frame. I think the red drives are really solid. the only time i've had dropped frames is when it was vibrating on the filmtools car mount ball leveling head. we took it off the head and bolted it directly to the cheeseplate and didn't get a single dropped frame after that. even though i've had fantastic results, i still feel everyone on the fear of spinning media on a camera. i'm sure this is just a temporary phase to keep everyone happy until there will be no use for spinning media on the red camera ever again!

 

[Dylan Reeve]

I guess your mileage will always vary. That sort of usage is certainly not what the drives are designed for - but yeah, they might work. Not sure I'd hang the hopes of my feature (you know, when I come up with a good idea, write it, and come up with the money) on a spinning disc for that sort of usage.

 

[Michael Hastings]

Editcam

Editcam

I believe Ikegami also make fairly substantial use of pre-write buffering to provide shock proctection. Although I've never seen or used their EditCam, so I could be wrong.

I owned 3 DNS-201W Editcams at one time, and the drives were very robust. It definitely had what they call retroloop which allowed caching (on the drive like a tivo does) up to 300 seconds but that is really just a functioning of constantly writing and then adjusting the FAT at the time you press record. I don't know how much actual drive write buffering was used - probably not much given they started with 4 gig drives when they went to EDITCAM II in 99.

The rubber shock absorbers were very simple - maybe cost 10 or 20 cents each in quantities of say 1000 piece minimum order from a rubber parts maker. I'm flabbergasted that RED did not incorporate this.

I would also question the use of a metal case for the REDDRIVE - the plastic EDITCAM Fieldpak case is also a shock absorber (not to mention a lot cheaper) and I bought 21 of them government surplus (they had a bunch of DNS-201Ws at Fort Meade) and never saw a problem with them, either on the original drives or when we replaced them (six screws) with 40, 80, and 120 gig new drives. No cracked cases ever.

 

[Paul Leeming]

The metal would be to dissipate the heat generated by two HDDs in a sealed enclosure.

I think the best solution will be to put some sort of shock absorber between the drive and the cage to dampen out vibration.

I'm hoping some enterprising individual uses those two components together in this style for a low cost fix, but if nothing eventuates soon I might try to hack something together myself.

Cheers,

Paul

 

[Joel Kaye]

I think the best solution will be to put some sort of shock absorber between the drive and the cage to dampen out vibration.

There is play between the cage and the drive. I think you could probably get rubber washers or grommets over the mounting bolts. There's also room for foam rubber - like is typically used to protect R/C aircraft receiver from vibration. I think the cage could be worked with. I think it could have been made 2 lbs lighter though.