V-Raptor Media Information

[Phil Holland]

I’ll attempt to keep this brief, but we can go very deep into the woods together discussing all things media related. I mainly want to discuss what media type RED V-Raptor uses, why, and some of the small differences in flash memory that may or may not have an impact on your decision on what to use. What I’m presenting here is based on my own R&D, testing, as well as consulting with RED, AngelBird, and even other manufacturers.

What type of Media does V-Raptor use and why?
First up. RED V-Raptor has a maximum data rate of around 800MB/s. That’s about a notable increase versus the maximum data rate of DSMC2 bodies at around 300MB/s. Because of that, particularly at higher frame rates, V-Raptor needs media that can handle that actual sustained write speed with over-provisioning.

The media type and technology RED chose for V-Raptor is Compact Flash Express Type-B. Also known as CFexpress or CFx. CFx has been around for a hot minute now, yet might be new to you. However, not all CFx is created equally and may not be ideal or compatible with V-Raptor. The performance levels that V-Raptor requires to sustain those maximum data rates are demanding. It’s rather critical to use RED Branded or RED approved media that has been fully tested and vetted. The critical features for V-Raptor is the CFx needs the media, controller, and firmware to all meet the specs required for reliable recording. RED has so far tapped Angelbird for their official media, but there are of course RED approved 3rd parties as well.

Selecting the right media for you.
There are some considerations when it comes to flash media. And this is where we get a bit technical, but I also want to provide some practical perspective here. Inside these CFx cards there can be several types of NAND flash as well as grades. RED right now is focusing on SLC and TLC driven NAND technology. These each provide an interesting balance between price, performance, and capacity. And the key word there is performance in the form of endurance. Let’s dive in.

There are actually 4 major types of flash media and I’ll attempt to summarize those differences below. SLC uses 1 bit per cell, MLC 2 bits, TLC 3 bits, and QLC 4 bits. This will have an impact on media cost, speed, endurance, and capacity for the given form factor of CFx.

Flash media is rated by PE or Program-Erase cycles, a number rating that reflects the ideal minimal cycles before the flash itself begins to wear. I’m providing general approximate minimum writes for each type of flash. And there’s a good chance it will perform beyond that spec in most cases.

Let’s take a look at Angelbird’s line-up for high speed CFx cards
AV PRO CFexpress XT MK2 330GB, 600GB, and 1.3TB are SLC mode driven
AV PRO CFexpress MK2 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB are TLC mode driven

This rings true for the RED branded media of the same capacities.
Taking a look at SLC and TCL NAND Flash for Consumer Grade Media this is often between 50,000-100,000 for SLC and 700-1,000 for TLC. But you will note I stated Consumer Grade Media. I reached out to Angelbird to get an idea of the expected performance for both SLC and TLC. First and most importantly they are using Enterprise/Industrial Grade NAND Flash and this has a big impact on reliability and longevity. Angelbird’s performance on SLC is 100,000+ PE cycles and for TLC is landing in the realm of 7,000-10,000 PE cycles.

What does this actually mean on a practical level?
Alright, you survived the tech stuff. Short and sweet, SLC cards will be lower capacity than TLC cards typically when it comes to price. And the question here is should the PE cycle difference be a concern for you if you want that higher capacity?

Consider a pretty heavy filming year for a single media card from a busy rental house or production. A nice number would be 250 days of filming with 4X full media writes and formats. An unusual and extreme workflow scenario really both in cycles and days worked in a year. This makes a nice even number of 1000 writes and formats per year. So for the RED Angelbird media TLC you would have about 7-10 years of this style of very heavy shooting ahead of you before hitting the spec PE rating. But I stress most people will be in the range of 15+ years considering most realistic scenarios are likely 10%-25% of that extreme use case. SLC is pretty much a worry-free condition all together as the PE cycles are so high, but of course smaller capacity cards. And yes, media can fail early for a variety of reasons, hopefully under warranty, but do treat your media like it’s your only child in a post apocalyptic survival film.

One last note regarding media failure. Angelbird’s cards have a feature that even when the card exceeds it’s PE cycles and can’t write data near the end of it’s cycles, you can still more than likely read off of it. This is a nice additional failsafe for motion picture recording. Several other manufacturers offer this, but not all which was a recent discovery.

Wrapping up and some tips.
Summarized perspective on all of this. If you need bigger mags for longer takes or if that fits your style of working, don’t freak out by the differences between SLC and TLC. This article in particular was inspired by the price equality versus capacity difference between the 660GB and 2TB RED CFx cards. In most situations and for most motion picture acquisition scenarios you won’t be hitting these PE cycle limits for many years.

I’ll end with some media tips. DO NOT put tape or labels on your CFx cards when inserted into the media bay. They run hotter and aren’t shielded like the previous generation Mini-Mags. You don’t want to add gunk into your camera for sure. I recommend paper tape when removing a full mag to alert that it has been rolled on. I’ve seen people be pretty hamfisted putting in the cards into the media slot. Though some of these cards do have some weather protection, as always avoid moisture near your media. CFx cases are cheap and the cards themselves usually have individual cases when you purchase them. Don’t just toss them in a camera bag, Lint and other baddies can get stuck in your pins.

 

[Michael Hopper]

Thanks Phil for another informative post-- I originally thought the RED store wasn't working properly for me when changing to the 2TB option as the price wouldn't change. Didn't even cross my mind that it was a difference in NAND type even though it wasn't the 1.3TB originally announced.

I agree 100% that "It’s rather critical to use RED Branded or RED approved media that has been fully tested and vetted" however that doesn't keep me from being curious about some of the other solutions you've alluded to testing in the background. How did the Zitay adapter fare out? Not necessarily on the bleeding edge of data-rates, but base level functionality--mounting, formatting, media door staying open, etc, and if you did any recording with it, did you find any hard limits (If so, what drives did you try in the adapter)?

I'm gearing up for an extremely long timelapse and debating between trying out the Zitay adapter with an 8TB Sabrent Rocket drive or taking the resolution hit and just running SDI to a capture card and doing it all on PC (100 TB in there should be enough, right? Ha ha). My biggest concern with the Zitay is whether there is enough power headroom in the media bay to allow for the higher capacity drives. Power consumption is actually a huge factor. I had been working on a dual card slot for DSMC2, and after powering the RAID controller the headroom in the power delivery system was only enough for a very select few low power consumption drives to function properly, so it never came to light.

Also, did you try out the Sintech m.2 2230 to CFx B dummy cards? From what I can tell it is purely a mechanical adapter with no IC. I ask purely to have a cheap alternative to use for charity work (rarely mission critical, if I lose a shot they'll still have the recording of the live feed as backup).

I know it's penny pinching, but the 2TB card at $1000 with 10,000 PE cycles costs ten cents per write cycle, or about five cents per TB written, the 660GB with 100,000 PE costs about one cent per write cycle, about one and a half cents per TB written. Not concerned about the penny, more just thinking I could throw together a small capacity card for volunteer work to keep the Red approved cards prime. Could possibly make some 1TB ones for a couple hundred dollars, or pending release price on Micron's newly announced 2TB 2230 PCIe 4.0 M.2 (cannot find out if it has DRAM, but with a 4.0 controller should be able to max out sustained write speeds on 3.0 the CFx B follows) potentially have a much more economical alternative for less than mission critical.

Great words of wisdom about card storage. I don't know what a person's budget ability would have to look like to spend a thousand dollars on a media card, but not spend an extra $30 on a proper case like the Pelican 0965 (though that same person will likely complain that for $1000 it should have came with a case)

Thanks again for the time you put into this resource as well as the many others you have brought purely to help others.

 

[Phil Holland]

Thanks Phil for another informative post

More or less I've been holding close to my chest the results I've had in testing media since receiving my first V-Raptor last year. I didn't expect to really go into the depths of testing I personally have, but keep in mind at the time only 660GB cards were available until fairly recently. I have projects where this capacity isn't exactly ideal due to the difficulty of swapping media in some of my specific applications.

I have indeed been testing various methods of CFx to M.2 NVMe to get into the 4TB and 8TB range. Even higher. There's a certainly point, much like my Komodo tests, where you need to provide external power to the media itself for everything to work happily. Over the last several months I've also been testing media that has yet to be released or recently has been. I know RED is taking a very serious approach to testing compatibility.

As of now all of my media that I have no problem using is Angelbird or Excascend. Can't speak for the new QLC Micron drive as I haven't tested it. Looking at their product briefing these seem to be more designed for read intensive workflows as their write data is significantly different than what you'd like to see for camera media. Remember we fill up cards and format them often daily, server side and computer drives function fairly differently as that would be unusual for that given market/use case.

As for the roll your own Sintech, nope, haven't investigating that concept. Opens up more pain points than it's worth honestly. Even the external M.2 cabled adapters provide some headaches that are difficult to digest, but necessary at this moment in time if you need very high capacity media.

Been a pretty interesting few years digging deeper into all of this. Have to express a great deal of gratitude to the higher tier manufacturers and even source flash vendors for providing a lot of this information. All of my workstations here are driven by SSD media until I get to external large RAIDs which occasionally use spinning discs. I have indeed blown through various consumer drives as I occasionally writing out many thousands of files rather quickly. that frustration lead to me investing in higher end and more costly media, but it's one of those depends on how you use it and what you expect out of it.

Back to V-Raptor media. This is all about getting quality and reliable media that can hit the maximum data rates the camera can hit. Now that things are open to 3rd parties, there's been some headaches, but I'm sure we'll see more RED branded and RED approved media now that the recipe for success is there.

 

[Taylor Morrison]

Super informative. Many thanks to your efforts and sharing as usual.


Taylor

 

[Russ Fill]

Thank you again as always Phil... great info and make me better at answering question from Productions that say...."hey why cant we just use cheeper cards."

 

[Martin Konrad]

Any long term experiences on cards?
I used 3 Anglebird 2TB cards for the last 3 years (estimated 500hours each).
One now shows a slow media error, shows up fine on my Mac but no formatting resolves the issue. The other 2 identical cards are (still) fine but I noticed the plastic on the end sticking out seems to start braking off…
Red hasn’t updated it’s approved list since 2021.
Any experience with Lexar Gold (Red approved) they are currently half price at B&H?

 

[Mitchell O]

Any long term experiences on cards?
I used 3 Anglebird 2TB cards for the last 3 years (estimated 500hours each).
One now shows a slow media error, shows up fine on my Mac but no formatting resolves the issue. The other 2 identical cards are (still) fine but I noticed the plastic on the end sticking out seems to start braking off…
Red hasn’t updated it’s approved list since 2021.
Any experience with Lexar Gold (Red approved) they are currently half price at B&H?

I recently got a refund on all three of my 2TB Angelbird cards after two years of having each replaced at least twice. Yet another replacement falling apart and another totally dead had me pushing for a refund, which I got.

Garbage cards.

 

[Martin Konrad]

Was the refund through them or a reseller? Unfortunately I did not register mine online, just found out now that it’s 3 years warranty only if registered online right after purchase. To be honest, I have never registered any of my memory cards in 25 years of using cards…

 

[Mitchell O]

Was the refund through them or a reseller? Unfortunately I did not register mine online, just found out now that it’s 3 years warranty only if registered online right after purchase. To be honest, I have never registered any of my memory cards in 25 years of using cards…

Through the retailer. Fed up with them falling apart and going through the replacement song and dance, a dead card taking footage with it was the last straw.