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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 RAM vs. RED DRIVE... unexpected results

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Brook Willard

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I finally got the chance to sit down and properly speed test the R2E cable in a controlled environment. I'm digging the cable [notably faster than FW, unloads FW bus, great build quality, buy one...], but I came up with some unexpected results during my testing.

The first thing I did was to test both the RED RAM and RED DRIVE speeds using BlackMagic's Disk Speed Test utility. I did a test for each by first connecting them via FireWire 800 [with power supply] and then with the R2E eSATA cable to a Sonnet E4P eSATA card. I generally use a different card for transfers [an ATTO SAS card with the appropriate cables], but I didn't have the adapters on hand today. I formatted the drives on a camera prior to the speed test [they were empty].

The RED DRIVE scored 75.1MB/s on FW800 and 95.9MB/s on eSATA.

The RED RAM scored 67.4MB/s on FW800 and 86.6MB/s on eSATA.

The results surprised me - I was expecting the RED RAM to be faster than the RED DRIVE... or at the very least the same speed. I know that BlackMagic's Disk Speed Test can give funny results sometimes, so I decided to try an additional test.

I rolled 4 minutes of footage at 4K 16:9 RC36 with the lens cap on to each drive. The resulting file was 6.12GB. I did a simple finder drag/drop to my DIT cart's RAID [which tested at ~850MB/s before the test] and timed the transfer with a stopwatch.

The results were - again - unexpected:

RED DRIVE via FW800: 1:31
RED DRIVE via eSATA: 1:07
RED RAM via FW800: 1:37
RED RAM via eSATA: 1:14

That works out to RED DRIVE speeds of 68.9/93.5 and RED RAM speeds of 64.6/84.6 on FW800/eSATA respectively.

So I guess the RED RAM is notably slower than the RED DRIVE. Weird.

Any thoughts? Anybody experience similar results? Deanan [etc.], any thoughts on the slower speeds?
 
I think it is (if I remember correctly) SSDs (Solid state drives) are faster to write than they are to read. Hence the faster throughput on camera than the red drives but slower on the copy process.
 
An SSD's big benefit is the improved latency. When it doesn't have to shuffle around a physical disk to get data, your latency is going to go down dramatically.
 
The Red drive is two drives in a RAID 0 array. Right?
The Red RAID is just one drive. Si?
What if you st the Red Raid up in a RAID 0?
 
Great test Brook!

I am glad to see this! I remember someone at Red (maybe Graeme) saying the RedDrives internally could not go fast enough for Firewire 800 so eSata had little benefit.

So, now I know eSata is worth it!

Thanks Dude, great job,
Prost,
Rich
 
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Just for fun, I did a few more tests. One involved drives with tons of short clips on them and the other was with a drive with ~40GB of footage on it.

No need to go into detail with the results... they weren't different. Still slower. Phooey.

I wonder if it's a limitation of the media or the RAID controller firmware.
 
Heh... I did this exact same testing (only with firewire 800 though) back in February when I first got my hands on RED-RAM. No one was really interested in commenting then...

But yes, RED RAM is slower than the RED DRIVE. I was surprised about it a bit, however RED is using SLC type SSDs in the RED RAM. This sacrifices performance and capacity in favor of reliability. The latest MLC SSDs, which are pretty much all the consumer SSDs, are really posting fast speeds lately.

I haven't had a chance to play with the LEMO to eSATA cable much and I keep thinking about ordering one for my kit. But I've since experienced the same speeds you're reporting with that cable for both the RED DRIVE and RED RAM on the two occasions I've used that cable.
 
Thats what I thought, Ive seen single SLC drives anywhere from 30 MB/s to 80 MB/s.
 
Nate Clapp said:
I think it is (if I remember correctly) SSDs (Solid state drives) are faster to write than they are to read. Hence the faster throughput on camera than the red drives but slower on the copy process.
Click to expand...
Other way around actually. Reading is much faster than writing for most SSDs.

I'm actually surprised at these results and am wondering if there's not a host controller bottleneck somewhere, like with the eSATA ExpressCard or the like.

I'm also curious as to exactly what SSD drives are in the RedRAM, though no one's opened one up yet to see. My Samsung SLC based SSDs are easily capable of reading over 90MB/s as a single drive. RAID 0 performance should be almost double that.

Cheers,

Paul
 
For those of you that shoot primarily in 2k, would anyone benefit form a side-by-side performance comparison of RED RAM vs a custom RAID0 configuration with two of our high-end SLC Memoright SSDS? I say 2k only because that’s the only way to record to a non RED drives (as uncertified media). Thoughts?
 
Inside the RedRam, The drives are Blank and all manufacturer's stickers are gone.
 
Alex Carr said:
Inside the RedRam, The drives are Blank and all manufacturer's stickers are gone.
Click to expand...
Did you see this first hand? If so, do the SSD casings look like brushed metal, or some other colour/style, like dappled matte black or whatever?

Kind of funny though, security via obfuscation is no security at all in the long run.... :cool:

Cheers for the info!

Paul
 
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I've heard that they're a silvery brushed aluminum with beveled corners. I've also heard that the [green] boards on the inside don't have any insignia, stickers or identifying marks on them.
 
Brook Willard said:
I've heard that they're a silvery brushed aluminum with beveled corners. I've also heard that the [green] boards on the inside don't have any insignia, stickers or identifying marks on them.
Click to expand...
Most likely that means the SSDs are OEM versions of Samsung SLC drives, though there could of course be other manufacturers with similar casing designs.

I imagine (though I don't know without seeing one) that the RAID board would be identical to the HDD version, since it's theoretically plenty fast enough to cope with both the HDD and SSD variants.

One day I'll no doubt get a hold of one and have a closer look.... :thumbsup:

Cheers,

Paul
 
i am curious, and since i come from the camera side of the process i am a little ignorant of the process a dit goes through to download footage, on average how long does it take to download a 16 g card vs 16g from a red ram vs 16 g from a red raid drive? also, it seems camera people are wary of using hard drives because of the perceived volatility of them wrt vibration etc during a shot. is this justified?
 
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I'll test all three mags via SATA today, just happen to have all the toys handy.

And the DIT side is the camera side... :)
 
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