Replacing Hard Drives in Red Hard Drives

[Shayne Cantly]

Being a film maker who is still paying off the loan I took out to buy a red camera, I was wondering if anyone has successfully pulled apart a red hard drive, and replaced the laptop hard drives that are inside? Surely this would be a cheaper option for those of us who cannot afford to buy the SSD drives, and keep using the 4 red drives they already have. Any help and advice would be appreciated.

 

[Curran Giddens]

The Red Drives have a custom firmware. They are not user-replaceable unfortunately.

 

[Shayne Cantly]

Well...that does suck. Why doesn't Red make the firmware available so we can still keep these drives alive? Or even sell just the internal drives so people can replace them if they want. I just don't understand.

 

[Ryan De Franco]

Shayne, Red can often be pretty helpful when dealing with specific technical problems like this one. I would be very surprised if there isn't some way they can help you out if you contact the right person on a weekday. I don't know who that person is, but maybe you could start by calling and asking for someone still involved with Red One service and support.

The drives are no longer listed on the "media" store page. While the Red One system is "end of life," I strongly suspect there is something they can do for you in terms of getting you working drives if yours are beginning to die. Maybe it's a discount on unused drives, maybe it's getting you the firmware update if you are capable of swapping out the drive yourself, etc, maybe you'll get lucky. f not, the old drives are often for sale at very affordable prices in the "red stuff for sale" forum.