RED Station through eSATA bridge for Mac

[Jeremy Nielsen]

Ok,

We're a small, rural college in Wyoming and we just purchased our first RED camera. We have a Mac computer lab and I was looking into the possibility of buy the LaCie eSATA to Thunderbolt bridge for transferring footage off our RED ssd mags.

Would such a thing save us any time at all?

Forgive any ignorance as we are pretty new to this game.

Jeremy Nielsen
Central Wyoming College

 

[Alex Hirzel]

It depends on what your alternatives are. If the only other option is Firewire 800, the LaCie eSATA bridge will be a huge improvement in speed. I have one, and can pull 250MB/s off of it with an attached G-RAID.

On the other hand, if you have USB 3.0, the difference will be far less dramatic, particularly if you are working with single (non-RAID) drives.

 

[Todd T]

I purchased a $21.00 SIIG esata to usb 3.0 adapter that gives me up to 150-170mb/s, and I can easily switch it between PC ad Mac.

 

[Jeremy Nielsen]

Thanks Alex,

It appears I didn't give quite enough info, we have the RED Station 1.8" that does not have a USB 3.0 port.

So it looks like the SATA bridge would be an improvement?

Jeremy Nielsen
Central Wyoming College

 

[Clint Lealos]

The answer to your question is "Yes". Offloading with eSATA will take a fraction of the time it takes on firewire 800. Best $200 you can spend

 

[Shiblon Wixom]

Both usb3 and esata use x1 PCIe lane to run at full speed, so as long as there is no bottleneck besides the red media you'll see around 200 MB/s speeds, maybe as high as 250 MB/s with the 512 Red SSD. Usb3 to esata adapters lose some speed to overhead but run over 150 MB/s. If a TB red reader existed, it does not, it would not run faster than esata or usb3, although you could run muliple readers at full speed in theory.