How long does it take to empty a 64gb red ssd card?

[Daniel P Rudin]

I don't see anything wrong with that.

Throwing around with 4 min. per SSD when asked about FW800 is not right.. in no way.. people get confused by that and make wrong assumptions.. you need substancial time on set if you dont have appropriate hardware with you (that includes ESATA and RAID)

You dont do the RED Community any good, if you only point out the theoretical best you can achieve.. lots of people will get frustrated that way once they receieve their Scarlets and find out, that it takes time to dump their only 64 GB SSD they have from the kit..

 

[Rocco Schult]

Any thoughts on the value of checksum verifcation for R3D file transfers?

Value for whom ?
I do DW professionally and it comes down to whom you have to supply to. If it's higher budgeted and insurance company or post-production is asking for it to guarantee a flawless workflow over several independent data instances (with the DW on set being the first one, digital lab maybe two and finally some VFX house and last but not least a DI facility), it at least makes sense to provide this level of security.
If you have a small budget shoot with limited time resources and are DIT/DW and whatnot at the same time, .. , well, make a guess.
I only had RED RAW file fail on me ever since when they were recorded to bloody CF and you didn't have the bloody right (UDMA) CF card reader.
And its not the files being corrupt, it is indeed the offload.
Nothing else, no Alexa, no EX, no 5D.
Thumbs pressed, not yet.

 

[Ivan G]

That's what my last fortune cookie read.

Hi Brian,

As far as I know, LaCie is a company with a very good reputation and high prices.

 

[Stefan Antonescu]

LOL.

My experience with LaCie external hard drives has always been great.

But I haven't tried all their products.

Any story you want to share ?

 

[Stephen Matthews]

Throwing around with 4 min. per SSD when asked about FW800 is not right.. in no way.. people get confused by that and make wrong assumptions.. you need substancial time on set if you dont have appropriate hardware with you (that includes ESATA and RAID)

You dont do the RED Community any good, if you only point out the theoretical best you can achieve.. lots of people will get frustrated that way once they receieve their Scarlets and find out, that it takes time to dump their only 64 GB SSD they have from the kit..

I'm sorry but it's very clear as long as you read his post, 4 minutes in ideal conditions and it was a guesstimate. Seems he's only trying to help and soon hopefully we will have people giving us more data points. And if we want more maybe we should try and encourage others to do so?

oh and he is a moderator who contributes a great wealth of knowledge to this site, whereas I have done very little, and lets be serious you have posted very little, so how about a little more benefit of the doubt and being polite to the people who take the time out of their day to make sure this place runs right.

have a good one!

 

[Daniel P Rudin]

Ok, Stephen.. you got me...

i just tried to be helpful with my post #20 in this thread, wanting to offer my years of experience designing & providing big storage subsystems & backup solutions (ok, not Movie-business, but the principles are the same) into the forum..

Seems you are doing quite well without my input, so i will stay silent here...

i have nothing to prove on storage level... but very much in moviemaking, so i will concentrate on where i have something to learn..

 

[Stephen Matthews]

not saying anything like that just trying to get people to be polite and respect others. We want contributions from all and to respect the opinions of others, especially when it comes from first hand knowledge with the products we are talking about.

Not once did I say you were wrong or not to contribute just to respect the contributions of others and to perhaps treat moderators with a little more respect. just because you perceive someone else to not be respecting you is no reason to be rude to them, an eye for an eye and all that.

sorry if I offended and I hope you stay around as all views are welcome and the more we have the more likely we are to getting away from misinformation and getting to the core of things.

Have a nice day!

P.s. this is a very potentially helpful thread and I think we should erase this conversation as it is adding nothing, or at the very least wrap it up or take it to PM before it gets out of hand.

 

[Enrique Blein]

So, can someone provide a setup for dummies? (surely i'm not the one on the armchair commentary) So far, my conclusion is to use eSata connection with at least 2 ports, maybe 4 if you are backing up to two different hard drives, right? and these have to be 7200 rpm. preferably 3.5" with eSata connectivity? what about best brands for best results? like, for a Macbook Pro?

BTW great thead.. it could save thousands of dollars in SSD memory actually...

 

[Brian Iannone]

So, can someone provide a setup for dummies? (surely i'm not the one on the armchair commentary) So far, my conclusion is to use eSata connection with at least 2 ports, maybe 4 if you are backing up to two different hard drives, right? and these have to be 7200 rpm. preferably 3.5" with eSata connectivity? what about best brands for best results? like, for a Macbook Pro?

BTW great thead.. it could save thousands of dollars in SSD memory actually...

You probably don't want to have an eSATA card in a notebook with 4 ports. Transferring data from the REDMAG to three drives simultaneously will slow things down a lot. Is that what you meant?

As for the best brands, are you asking about the best brands for notebooks, hard drives or hard drive enclosures?

 

[Enrique Blein]

I said 4 just because I don't know if the are eSata cards with 3 slots...One would be for the RedStation, the other 2 for each hard drive (assuming I am doing two simultaneous backups)...thanks BTW for all the info, very useful...and happy birthday too

as for best brands for eSata cards, I gather from the posts that Caldigit ranks best, then ATTO, Lacie and Sonnetec. What would you recommend for backing up harddrives? (I have a 15' dual core 2.8 Ghz Macbokk Pro)

 

[Brian Iannone]

as for best brands for eSata cards, I gather from the posts that Caldigit ranks best, then ATTO, Lacie and Sonnetec. What would you recommend for backing up harddrives? (I have a 15' dual core 2.8 Ghz Macbokk Pro)

For eSATA cards, I agree with Jeff; CalDigit is excellent. Especially their FASTA-2ex (which I believe is actually the only eSATA ExpressCard/34 card they make). For desktops/workstations, I would go with ATTO if you don't need RAID. If you want to setup a RAID array, then go with LSI.

As for hard drives, there are a few different configurations I would recommend depending on whether or not you're using RAID and whether you want a do-it-yourself (often faster) or ready-made solution.


Do-It-Yourself, 2-Disk RAID 0 (Fastest)
Hard Drives:
Two Seagate Barracuda or Barracuda XT drives, depending on the capacity you want.

If you want the total available space to be 6TB, use two 3TB Seagate Barracuda XT's (model ST330005N1A1AS-RK)
For 4TB, use two 2TB Seagate Barracuda XT's (model ST320005N1A1AS-RK)
For 2TB, use two 1TB Seagate Barracuda's (model ST310005N1A1AS-RK)
For 1TB, use two 500GB Seagate Barracuda's (model ST3500641AS-RK)

Hard Drive Enclosure: OWC Mercury Elite Pro RAID

Take the two drives and install them in the enclosure. The enclosure supports RAID 0, so it'll strip the disks together. This is the fastest solution, but it requires you to buy the hard drives and the enclosure separately and put them in yourself (which by the way, is extremely easy). It's also the most expensive solution, depending on what size drives you choose. Connect the enclosure to one of the eSATA ports on the eSATA ExpressCard/34 card in the notebook. Connect the REDMAG station to the other eSATA port and transfer your footage directly from the REDMAG to the external array (the hard drive enclosure).


Ready-Made, 2-Disk RAID 0 (Fast)
G-Technology G-RAID. It's an enclosure with two hard drives preinstalled and preconfigured in RAID 0. Easy and fast. They have capacities in 2, 4 and 6TB.


Do-It-Yourself, 1-Disk No RAID (Slow)
Hard Drives:
I'd recommend using the same hard drives I mentioned above for the do-it-yourself, 2-disk RAID 0 array, but just get one instead.

3TB: Seagate Barracuda XT ST330005N1A1AS-RK
2TB: Seagate Barracuda XT ST320005N1A1AS-RK
1TB: Seagate Barracuda ST310005N1A1AS-RK
500GB: Seagate Barracuda ST3500641AS-RK

Hard Drive Enclosure: OWC Mercury Elite Pro

Take the hard drive and install it inside the enclosure. Connect the enclosure to one of the eSATA ports on the eSATA ExpressCard/34 card that's in the notebook. Connect the REDMAG station to the other eSATA port.

This is a slow solution because the speed of the single hard drive can't keep up with the speed of the REDMAG. So, the drive is going to be slowing you down (a lot).


Ready-Made, 1-Disk No RAID (Slowest)
G-Technology G-Drive. It has a single drive, so you have no RAID (so basically no speed). Available in 1, 2 and 3TB models. This is the slowest, but most "budget-frienldy" solution.


The reason I state that the ready-made drives/enclosures are typically slower than the do-it-yourself solutions is because you don't always know what drives the manufacturer's (like G-Technology) are using. G-Tech, for example, almost always uses high-performance Hitachi disks, so they're a better bet than others. But, you still can't be guaranteed that the disk inside is of high quality. Whereas if you go the do-it-yourself way, you know exactly what model hard drive you're using.

I said 4 just because I don't know if the are eSata cards with 3 slots...One would be for the RedStation, the other 2 for each hard drive (assuming I am doing two simultaneous backups)

Doing a simultaneous backup is, of course, much safer but it's also much slower. You're decreasing your speed dramatically because you're transferring data from one port and to two ports at the same time. The ExpressCard interface can only handle so much data. Transferring to and from three devices simultaneously is too much. Again, it's much safer because you now have your footage on two drives, so if one fails, you have your backup. But, it's slower.

An alternative solution is this:
Connect the REDMAG station and Hard Drive Array #1 (I'll refer to this as Array #1) to the eSATA ExpressCard. Transfer your footage from the REDMAG to Array #1. Unplug the REDMAG. Connect Array #2. Transfer the footage from Array #1 to Array #2 so that you now have a backup.

That alternative solution is not really 'fantastic', however, because you're wasting time while backing up Array #1 to Array #2.

I can recommend to you a RAID 5 solution if you want. With a RAID 5 array, the chance of data loss is much, much less than with RAID 0. And, you only need one array (instead of two [one primary and one backup] with RAID 0).

For those of you here with a current Mac that has Thunderbolt (especially a 17" MacBook Pro with an ExpressCard/34 slot), this issue is nonexistent. You connect your REDMAG station to an eSATA ExpressCard and connect your hard drive array using Thunderbolt. You'll never run out of bandwidth.

and happy birthday too

Thanks!

I hope this helps!

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

This thread kinda fell apart... Sorry about the armchair comment. I'm not going to go into specifics, but there were a couple people recommending products that are currently incompatible with the RED Station and RED SSD media. In other words, it's obvious they haven't tried it. And I addressed that incompatibility above, so...

I felt I covered my bases in my post regarding offload times. Even stated that best case scenario over FW800 is 76MB/s... I don't recall if I actually wrote it, but offload time for a full 64GB SSD via FW800, if you can sustain the maximum data rate there, is about 15 minutes. Or about the same time as it takes to offload a 256GB SSD on an ideal system that can read the SSD at full speed and keep up with the writes. If I didn't make that all 100% clear, then sorry.

Yes, I'm speaking from experience. I don't have any 64GB SSD's, but I own 7x256GB and 4x128GB RED SSD's and have offloaded them a time or two...

For eSATA cards, I agree with Jeff; CalDigit is excellent. Especially their FASTA-2ex (which I believe is actually the only eSATA ExpressCard/34 card they make). For desktops/workstations, I would go with ATTO if you don't need RAID. If you want to setup a RAID array, then go with LSI.

Not trying to be the buzzkill guy here, but you don't want LSI on a Mac. LSI provides no drivers for the Mac, they are supplied by Apple and written half-assed. Best RAID cards on Mac are ATTO, Areca and HighPoint. ATTO are probably the most bullet-proof and your only real option on the Mac for attaching an LTO tape unit. HighPoint have the most ports and some interesting performance options. Areca are Mac-bootable, the only RAID cards that are (outside of that P.O.S. Apple sells).

On Windows, the three I already mentioned are still great. But you also have some more options with LSI, 3Ware and others... Support for additional devices like LTO systems is broader and there are fewer incompatibilities to deal with between cards and devices.

As for hard drives, there are a few different configurations I would recommend depending on whether or not you're using RAID and whether you want a do-it-yourself (often faster) or ready-made solution.

Personally I prefer the WD Black-X RE4 series drives for RAID configs. The 2TB models have been solid <knock wood> I have dozens of them installed in RAIDs and haven't lost one yet. They're faster than both the Hitachi and Seagate 2TB units too. For 1TB drives, it's a toss-up between Seagate, Hitachi and WD... For 3TB, I think the Hitachi UltraStars are the best. But they haven't been out long enough to prove that they're reliable... I have 4 of them in a RAID-5 box (CalDigit) and they seem OK so far... testing...

The OWC enclosures are nice. For an all aluminum RAID 0/ 1 dual-drive enclosure they're a great choice.

For those of you here with a current Mac that has Thunderbolt (especially a 17" MacBook Pro with an ExpressCard/34 slot), this issue is nonexistent. You connect your REDMAG station to an eSATA ExpressCard and connect your hard drive array using Thunderbolt. You'll never run out of bandwidth.

Both the LaCie Thunderbolt Little Big Disk and the Promise Thunderbolt RAIDs are excellent. I can't comment on the SSD versions of the LaCie, but I have the 2TB HDD version and it's pretty snappy for what it is. It can sustain over 130MB/s for writes in my tests so far. But I haven't attempted to write across large portions of it yet.

 

[Brian Iannone]

Thanks for pointing out those errors I made Jeff! =) I wouldn't want to recommend something and someone tries it and finds out it doesn't work (like the LSI cards on the Mac). I personally have never tried using an LSI SATA/RAID controller on a Mac before (only on PC's), so I probably shouldn't have recommended it the way I did. I was writing so much that I didn't specify a few things I should have.

As for hard drives, I suppose it all comes down to personal preference. Out the 3 Western Digital drives and 31 Seagate drives I have, all 3 WD's failed and all 31 Seagate's are still running flawlessly. I personally tend to prefer Seagate and Hitachi. I will say, however, that I've had excellent experiences with WD's Velociraptors.

I've found that Seagate's 3TB drives are actually very fast. I have eight of them in a RAID 0 array and get speeds of more than 1 GB/s (135 MB/s reads per disk). The ones I tested were faster than Htachi's (I never compared it to WD's 3TB disk because I heard they had a high failure rate. I don't if that's true, though.).

I'll post some speed results on some Seagates I have in a Mac Pro and a couple of workstation PC's.

 

[Danai Chutinaton]

Hi Jeff,

Your insights have been very helpful on the mac side of things. What are your thoughts on using this type of configuration on windows purely for offloading on set?

A Notebook/Laptop computer running Windows 7 with 2 x USB3 ports and an eSATA port.
RedStation connected to eSATA port
2 x 1 TB desktop drives in USB3 enclosure connected to each USB3 port for 2 copies (http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=240)

Should I format the drives NTFS to avoid the 4GB file size limit or does the Scarlet/Epic automatically split the files into 4GB chunks?

Are there any speed or reliability issues with mounting NTFS volumes on OSX apart for being read only?

My research seems to indicate that a single 7200 RPM drive running on USB3 would have an average sustained write speed of around 90MB/s which would mean I can download a 64GB SSD in under 15 minutes if my math is correct.

My reasoning for using USB3 external drives is that they are easy to obtain where I live and don't cost a lot. This way I can hand off one drive to my client at the end of the day and keep the other drive for my own copy. I can then just charge the client for the cost of the drive as if it were "tape".

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Hi Jeff,

Your insights have been very helpful on the mac side of things. What are your thoughts on using this type of configuration on windows purely for offloading on set?

A Notebook/Laptop computer running Windows 7 with 2 x USB3 ports and an eSATA port.
RedStation connected to eSATA port
2 x 1 TB desktop drives in USB3 enclosure connected to each USB3 port for 2 copies (http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.aspx?id=240)

Should work just fine. Not sure about the WD MyBook drives or how they perform these days. In the past, the first couple years, they were horrible with lots of reliability issues. Not the drives themselves failing but the enclosures. You may find that you will be juggling around different enclosures or external drive models based on your clients anyway. Most Mac based clients are going to want enclosures with FW800 on them, perhaps eSATA. PC clients are still going to look for eSATA, but also USB3.0. No one wants to use USB2. And I'm not aware of any enclosure out there that bundles eSATA, FW800 and USB3.0 ports on the same unit. Rosewill was supposedly coming out with one, but I haven't seen it yet. The model it's intended to replace was discontinued a few months ago, which has been problematic for me, because it's the enclosure I've been using for the past 2 years -- has eSATA, USB2 and FW800 in a rugged aluminum case and they were cheap and reliable.

Should I format the drives NTFS to avoid the 4GB file size limit or does the Scarlet/Epic automatically split the files into 4GB chunks?

All RED cameras currently format their media as FAT32 (as nearly all CF and other Flash memory types do) and they break all clips into 2GB pieces. This is very useful for a lot of reasons, not just keeping media compatible in cross-platform environments. For example, if a part of the media is corrupt or an error occurs while recording, it will hopefully only corrupt that one 2GB chunk.

Are there any speed or reliability issues with mounting NTFS volumes on OSX apart for being read only?

For drives being handed off to the client, I always format them how the client requests (NTFS, FAT32, OSX HPFS). For all drives I use internally, I format them based on my intended workflow for the project. If I'm unsure or know that I'll be using them on the Mac for any significant portion, I'll format for MacOS. Lots of software tools out there to read them on Windows -- more so than NTFS solutions for the Mac and fewer security issues. The big reason NTFS is read-only on the Mac has to do with how NTFS ties into system account-level security. It's a non-issue 99.9% of the time since most normal people never engage any of the NTFS security features anyway, but Apple chose not to implement it because they couldn't support all of the functionality -- at least that's the reason they have given officially. But generally speaking if you don't know what the client needs, then NTFS is often a safe bet. It's more reliable on large volumes (1TB and up) than FAT32 and any system can at least read the data. This is opposite of what I do for myself internally, but every reasonably current Mac and PC can read an NTFS volume and not all PC clients will have the software to read a Mac-formatted disk.

My research seems to indicate that a single 7200 RPM drive running on USB3 would have an average sustained write speed of around 90MB/s which would mean I can download a 64GB SSD in under 15 minutes if my math is correct.

Rotational speed isn't always an indication of drive speed, but it is one factor that determines it. On the latest 1TB 7200rpm drives with 64MB cache, you should be able to sustain 80MB/s or more, some will do 90+ for at least a portion of the drive area. I would say your 90MB/s is a safe bet +/- 10%. And under 15 minutes is a reasonable expectation. At 90MB/s sustained, a full 64GB SSD should unload in just a bit over 12 minutes. Even if the sustained rate is 80MB/s, you should still be able to unload that SSD in under 14 minutes.

 

[Danai Chutinaton]

Thank you Jeff!

Most Mac based clients are going to want enclosures with FW800 on them, perhaps eSATA. PC clients are still going to look for eSATA, but also USB3.0. No one wants to use USB2. And I'm not aware of any enclosure out there that bundles eSATA, FW800 and USB3.0 ports on the same unit.

You raise a very good point here. Maybe a better solution would be to get a laptop with a built in eSATA port, USB3 ports, and an Express34 card slot. I could then use an Express34 to eSATA card for eSATA enclosures. Any recommendations on a good Express34 to eSATA card for PC's?

 

[Brian Iannone]

@ Jeff

Wow, you have more than 2.3TB in REDMAG SSD's? That is quite impressive! =D

Not trying to be the buzzkill guy here

In my opinion, sharing personal experiences isn't considered as being a 'buzzkill guy'. I think it's great that there are people here on the forum, including experts like you, who can share their experiences and offer advice based on how things have worked out for them. Different people have different experiences with the same equipment. I think it's amazing that people can share what works and what doesn't work for them here, all in one place.

Of course, I may have a different opinion of what equipment I prefer, but I would never, ever consider you to be a buzzkill guy. =)

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Some PC notebooks, especially 17" models, have dual eSATA ports to work with. If you need an ExpressCard to add a port or two, once again, the CalDigit card is great. USB3 is handy to have, but it's kinda just so-so in terms of real performance and most people are still not using it. Enclosures with eSATA, FW800 and USB2.0 will probably still be the most usable by most clients in most situations. eSATA 3Gbps is usually faster than USB3.0 even though the USB3 is "5Gbps" (4.8 peak, actually), it has a LOT of overhead and higher latency it only starts to outpace SATA-II on large, continuous transfers and it can't touch 6Gbps SATA. ...Not a whole lot of 6Gbps eSATA enclosures out there. Once again, don't know of any that also have FW800 or USB3.

 

[Brian Iannone]

While USB 3.0 is much slower than SATA/eSATA 6 Gbps, I've found it to be much faster than SATA/eSATA 3 Gbps. The fastest speed I've ever gotten out of a SATA 3 Gbps link was [RETRACTED] MB/s. That's the fastest out of all the tests I've done in quite a number of different situations (HDD arrays, SSD arrays, SSD chip-link adaptors, etc.). I've only recently started testing USB 3.0, but the fastest speed I've gotten so far is [RETRACTED] MB/s. That speed was accomplished with a RAID 0 array of SSD's wired over a single USB 3.0 link. That's significantly faster than even the maximum throughput that SATA 3 Gbps is capable of. Due to USB's architecture, it has overhead issues when transferring large amounts of data. USB 2.0 is good for mice and keyboards and does an okay job at transporting current, but it's useless for hard drives. However, USB 3.0 is surprisingly good with data. I personally have found it to be faster than SATA 3 Gbps even with small files (100MB, 250MB, 500MB files). When transferring files smaller than 100MB, however, the transfer rates slow down a lot to around [RETRACTED] MB/s with the array I was using.

As you say Jeff, there is a lack of hard drive and RAID enclosures that have an eSATA 6 Gbps connection. Because of this, I'm going to be using a Sans Digital enclosure with USB 3.0 for the primary backup array of my main editing workstation. If there was an abundance of eSATA 6 Gbps enclosures out there, I would recommend it instead. However, right now, I think USB 3.0 is a better choice.

I'm not trying to say anyone is wrong or anything (absolutely not what I'm trying to do). I'm just pointing out some of the speeds I've gotten with USB 3.0.

Of course, neither USB 3.0 or eSATA 6 Gbps can compare with Thunderbolt. If only they started making some more enclosures that supported it...

 

[Enrique Blein]

Hi Brian and Jeff, I can't thank you enough. What would be the time to download a 64Gb card using eSata, into this 1.5 TB mini G-Raid:

http://www.amazon.com/G-Technology-...6?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1322442884&sr=1-6

I am looking at this, because its ability to be bus powered, (I need the flexibility to download when I'm not near electricity outlets.)

they claim: "G-RAID mini is capable of delivering an unprecedented 120+MB/second transfer rate when connected via eSATA in RAID 0 mode. G-RAID mini is FireWire bus-powered even when connected via eSATA."

BTW, if I used RAID 1 on this HD, I would get an identical backup on each 750 Gb drive at a slower rate?