RED Mini-mag SSD Life Cycle

[Jason Han]

Has anyone reached the end of the life cycle of a RED Mini-mag yet? A technie recently told me that it would be a bad idea to buy a very used up 1TB RED mini-mag as it is more likely to die faster. Wondering if it's a better investment to always buy a new mag?

 

[Bob Gundu]

You'll be dead before the card does. Ok, thats slightly exaggerated.

 

[Adam Rook]

OMG Bob's going to kill you!

 

[Adam Rook]

Thanks for asking this, Jason. I was wondering that myself.

 

[Elie Honein]

If you record and format the card once every single day you are looking for 3-5 years. If you do the same every other day you'll double that time. As long as the card has not been dropped or pulled out of the camera before eject too many times you should be ok.

 

[Jason Han]

You'll be dead before the card does. Ok, thats slightly exaggerated.

Haha that's resassuring

If you record and format the card once every single day you are looking for 3-5 years. If you do the same every other day you'll double that time. As long as the card has not been dropped or pulled out of the camera before eject too many times you should be ok.

Cool thanks for the info, looks like I don't have to worry about the life too much!

 

[chase kempf]

My 512 mini-mag is dying a slow death, won't boot on usb3 reader only firewire 800. Getting "media full" recording errors. Sent to RED and they want $2000.00 to repair. I also own a the 1.8 mags and they never had issues.

 

[Fabricio Morato]

I don't know if it uses the same tech and how acurate would translate to mini-mags, but in this stress test some SSDs could achieve 2PB of writing before dying. If it holds true, someone else made the math and said you would need to write around 570GB a day for 10 straight years to make it fail.

http://techreport.com/review/27436/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes

 

[Louis Maddalena]

My 512 mini-mag is dying a slow death, won't boot on usb3 reader only firewire 800. Getting "media full" recording errors. Sent to RED and they want $2000.00 to repair. I also own a the 1.8 mags and they never had issues.

What was wrong with it?

 

[Alex Kiritz]

If you record and format the card once every single day you are looking for 3-5 years. If you do the same every other day you'll double that time. As long as the card has not been dropped or pulled out of the camera before eject too many times you should be ok.

I don't know where you're getting this from but I do not believe it correlates at all with reality. eMLC flash memory like that used in mini-mags should last for 20,000+ cycles, not 1100-1800.

 

[Jason Han]

My 512 mini-mag is dying a slow death, won't boot on usb3 reader only firewire 800. Getting "media full" recording errors. Sent to RED and they want $2000.00 to repair. I also own a the 1.8 mags and they never had issues.

I talked to red tech about this and they told me to do a secure format every time you grab a used mag or when you have a mag that's been used heavily, you should do a secure format. If you haven't tried it here's how:

SECURE FORMAT MEDIA
1) MENU > MEDIA > UTILS
2) Secure Format