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How to get data from Redmag to external HDD FAST?

E

emil tanem

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I'm shooting a documentary. What fast solutions are there for getting the material off the redmags and onto external HDDs fast?

Seems to me just going through most laptops creates a 20MB/s bottleneck. Sometimes faster - if you're lucky.
Isn't there a way to avoid this? I mean ideally why not just connect the redstation (with usb3)directly to some sort of HDD gismo?


Visiting NAB last year fas fun, but what's the point in speaking to all those HDD solution sellers speaking about 500MB/s solutions when none of them are willing to tell us which laptops can do what speeds? (it goes for stationaries as well ofc, but I'm not up for carrying one of those around atm)

Oh! and whatever happened to that thunderbolt for PC input they promised me would be out in three weeks..

edit: THis is my laptop:
https://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/ASUS_ZENBOOK_UX21E/
 
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I'd bet that the bottleneck is the drives that you are writing to. A single drive, especially a compact enclosure with a 2.5", is slow. A good solution is to use a raid with two or more fast spinning drives.

Or better yet, but some larger SSD's and then back off of those every night, overnight. The Intel 600gb SSD is getting cheaper. I can't imagine shooting more than 600 gigs per day.

So dump to fast SSD's in the field and then re copy those files overnight to your archive drives perhaps.
 
There's something wrong with your laptop or your external drive if you're only getting 20MB/s with USB3. Does your laptop actually support USB3? Does your external drive? That's slower than what I get for USB2 transfers.
 
We use Redmag -- eSata -->computer -- thunderbolt --> hard drive and can dump a full 128gb card in about 25 minutes.

Should clarify -- we use an eSata to Expresscard on the Macbook Pro. I'd imagine you could get similar speeds by substituting eSata for the more readily available USB3.
 
USB 3 SSD reader and off the shelf drive will give you 100MB a second consistently. That's what I use in the field for live shows.

At this rate you can transfer a 256GB SSD in 41 minutes, or 128 in just over 20 minutes.

There are stand alone transfer boxes but they won't go faster than this.

If you're getting 20MB a second then you clearly aren't using USB3 devices to do it. That would be your best bet to cut transfer times dramatically without a specialized RAID solution.
 
I bought a couple of lacie rugged thunderbolt drives and thought I would be in good shape. It turned out that they where very slow drives in them. So another drive I have with esata is much faster than the rugged drives.

Normally to get max speed I use Thunderbolt from my air to a x2 Thunderbolt and X2 ESATA adapter from lacie and from there to the discs and to a thunderbolt red rocket enclouse. With fast HDD estata drives I can then empty a 128Gb mag in about 14minutes. The TB rugged lacie drives where about 35 minutes.
 
happy with my current setup. working with the lacie esata thunderbolt hub and two LACIE LBD thunderbolt disks.. about 200MB/s sustained. rdepending on wether you want secure transfer.. bottleneck is the reader at the moment so a checksum takes the speed out of this set up quickly. third disk is usually the clients so three copies. Just bought a promise pegasus raid with 6 bays that also has thunderbolt, will have to see how that goes. probably in a striped double 3 disk raid 5, leaving me two disks that can fail before loosing data. that leaves me at 8 TB free space at the moment with 6 disks with 2TB capacity.
 
I've read speed tests where the LaCie TB / eSATA adapter maxes out around 190MBps per drive. Would someone mind running some benchmarks on it to see if that's true? Writing simultaneously to 2 eSATA drives. And reading from 1, writing to the other. The RedStation can do about 220MBps, so I don't want to settle for 190.
 
128GB ssd card in 12 minutes
Esata
Thunderbolt
USB3
MBP
 
Using a USB3 bus-powered enclosure (with an SSD inside), is everyone getting ~200mb/s?

I know REDmags top out at approximately ~200mb/s on eSata, so if the USB3.0 reader maxes that out and a USB3.0 bus-powered enclosure ALSO gets about that, that's probably the direction I'll go in. Otherwise I'll be gacked up with converters and adapters and basically the entire thing becomes far less field-friendly (and impossible for battery only, which I tend to use in a pinch).

Currently with a regular ol' OTS WD USB3.0 bus-powered spinning drive (2.5"), I'm getting about ~85mb/s read/write (which is actually pretty good considering the drives are $80 per TB), but I'd be lying if I said I was content. It be nice if SSDs were cheaper; $600 for 1TB is still quite high, given the need for two/redundancy.
 
emil tanem said:
I should have noted that I have a Asus ux21 ultrabook laptop. It only has one USB3 connection.
https://www.asus.com/Notebooks_Ultrabooks/ASUS_ZENBOOK_UX21E/

Seems to me that everyone that is close to 200MB/s is using mac..?
Click to expand...

That is your problem, one of your drives has to go through the slow USB 2.0 port.
You could at least double your speed by connecting both drives to an inexpensive USB 3.0 hub.

Everyone else is getting faster speeds because they have both devices separately connected to fast interfaces (combinations of USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, or Esata)
 
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