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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 :)

RED CF Reader Recommendations

Andy Best

Andy Best

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I am looking into getting a couple more CF readers. Right now I am using a Lexar. Is this a decent brand? If not, do you recommend a reader?

Thank you in advance.
 
Pretec claims they are about to put out a USB 3.0 CF reader. I've been waiting on that.
 
I can't recommend the RED CF readers highly enough! I like the 4 port lacie esata card hooked to 4 RED CF stations, and then a 5th station via FW800. That's the epitome of speed at this point. On the current project I'm on, we've downloaded more than 2500 cards and they have been rock solid.
 
I can't recommend the RED CF readers highly enough! I like the 4 port lacie esata card hooked to 4 RED CF stations, and then a 5th station via FW800. That's the epitome of speed at this point. On the current project I'm on, we've downloaded more than 2500 cards and they have been rock solid.
Click to expand...
That's amazing! How do you have the RED CF stations already? Do you have all the RED stations hooked to the base? How does that system fit together? Finally, the 5th station, is that another RED module?

That's what I am looking into buying. Thanks for your help!!
 
We're "testing" them on the current show I'm on. I know that like many other RED products that the final touches are usually what take the longest, in this case the FCC testing is the cause of the delay. You don't want to release a product that is this important (RED doesn't mess with media) unless it is perfect.

The power stations can power 3 of the readers, so for 5 readers you can use 2 power stations and then you don't have as many power cables (which is a lot bigger of a deal than you might think).

Each station connects to the computer through, USB, Firewire 800, or Esata. We're using kits provided by LightIron Digital that have the Lacie 4 port esata card. Each CF reader is connected with it's own esata cable to the pcie card, so there are 4 esata cables to the computer and our 5th CF station is connected via FW800.


We're downloading to a few locations, one of which is a Maxx Digital EVO 4k. A fast array is needed to really take advantage of the kind of speed possible with 5 RED cf cards, each one does around 80MB/sec when doing sha256 checksums.

I've used the Lexar FW800 reader in the past and I loved it, but now it's hard not to think of that as a toy compared to the RED CF station. The lexar works really well, but only being able to use FW800 is a real limitation, RED's solution gives you so many options and allows you to really maximize it's use based on the best connection your system has (esata, fw800, usb2.0 in descending order).
 
Steve Freebairn said:
We're "testing" them on the current show I'm on. I know that like many other RED products that the final touches are usually what take the longest, in this case the FCC testing is the cause of the delay. You don't want to release a product that is this important (RED doesn't mess with media) unless it is perfect.

The power stations can power 3 of the readers, so for 5 readers you can use 2 power stations and then you don't have as many power cables (which is a lot bigger of a deal than you might think).

Each station connects to the computer through, USB, Firewire 800, or Esata. We're using kits provided by LightIron Digital that have the Lacie 4 port esata card. Each CF reader is connected with it's own esata cable to the pcie card, so there are 4 esata cables to the computer and our 5th CF station is connected via FW800.


We're downloading to a few locations, one of which is a Maxx Digital EVO 4k. A fast array is needed to really take advantage of the kind of speed possible with 5 RED cf cards, each one does around 80MB/sec when doing sha256 checksums.

I've used the Lexar FW800 reader in the past and I loved it, but now it's hard not to think of that as a toy compared to the RED CF station. The lexar works really well, but only being able to use FW800 is a real limitation, RED's solution gives you so many options and allows you to really maximize it's use based on the best connection your system has (esata, fw800, usb2.0 in descending order).
Click to expand...

Thanks for the excellent battle tested field report Steve! Always great to have real world analysis of kit under extreme conditions. Many of us are jazzed to take delivery, but with the recent CF EOL announcement and SSD being the media of choice. I see this being the R1 M-X tool of choice rather than going SSD on the M-X right way.
 
Thanks Steve,

It's great to get a real world update, and I'm patiently waiting for mine.

It's not clear to me if the CF reader can be powered in a pinch via the FW800 bus or if it always requires an AC adapter or base station.

Not a big deal, as I've got a pile of Lexar's to meet that need if it arises, but it would be good to know.

Also why an esata card? I'm using an Atto HBA with a fan out cable so that I can use the same PCIe card for a SAS connection to LTO4 when I need it, or to fan out to esata drives / CF offload etc.

I mentioned that to Michael when I was in town to do training on Outpost. Seems like a good option to me.

Outpost is wicked cool BTW! Looking forward to working with it soon.

Cheers,

Stephen
 
Stephen Lovett said:
Thanks Steve,

It's great to get a real world update, and I'm patiently waiting for mine.

It's not clear to me if the CF reader can be powered in a pinch via the FW800 bus or if it always requires an AC adapter or base station.

Not a big deal, as I've got a pile of Lexar's to meet that need if it arises, but it would be good to know.

Also why an esata card? I'm using a Atto HBA with a fan out cable so that I can use the same PCIe card for a SAS connection to LTO4 when I need it, or to fan out to esata drives / CF offload etc.

I mentioned that to Michael when I was in town to do training on Outpost. Seems like a good option to me.

Outpost is wicked cool BTW! Looking forward to working with it soon.

Cheers,

Stephen
Click to expand...

FW800 can power the RedStation.
Esata is bit better because you can have multiple readers copying without slowing down to one fw800 that's shared.
 
Deanan said:
FW800 can power the RedStation.
Esata is bit better because you can have multiple readers copying without slowing down to one fw800 that's shared.
Click to expand...

:thumbup1:

Thank Deanan!

Yeah, I'm really looking forward to the e-sate speed increase.

Looks like I'm going to have several Lexar card reader for sale :-)

Steve
 
I'll do more testing, but the driver/OS combination at this point has problems when you try and use 4 esata devices with an H380/fanout cable, It's not a RED CF problem, I have the same results with HDD docks. The fanout cables work fine when you only use 1 channel or sometimes 2, but when you do lots of I/O on all 4 channels, it slows to a halt. Again, this is probably just a driver issue, so I'll post back when I can test more.

The 4 port esata card has been the fastest multi i/o way of reading the cards to this point.

When the SSDs are out and in broad use, things will change because of how amazingly fast they are, I think you'll see a lot of people that buy 2-4 SSD stations from RED and that will be enough to saturate most systems I/O capabilities.
 
Steve Freebairn said:
The fanout cables work fine when you only use 1 channel or sometimes 2, but when you do lots of I/O on all 4 channels, it slows to a halt.
Click to expand...

Thanks Steve,

Makes sense.

I think I've seen this, but not to the extent you report here, just slower when I went to three esata offload drives. Then again I'm working smaller shoots than you so I'm generally not offloading more than two channels simultaneously, and the G-Tech or Istorage mini-raids I'm copying to from the main raid have throughput well under 200 MB/s.

What are you using to measure simultaneous throughput? Or are you just measuring one channel while the others are active?

Let me know if I can help.

I completely agree that we're going to hit a bigger bottleneck in offload speed soon, and I have thought about augmenting my cart with a couple of hacked MacMini severs with one drive pulled and an e-sata connector pass through as a possible solution.

Cheers,

Steve
 
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