What's in a RED RAM?

[Petri Teittinen]

Could someone enlighten me about RED RAM's innards? I'd like to know if it consists of two enclosed SSD drives connected via regular SATA to a controller, or is it simply a bunch of memory chips on a PCB soldered on to a controller?

Thanks!

 

[Paul Leeming]

It's 2 Samsung SSD's attached to the same controller as the regular RedDrive (which contains Hitachi HDD's).

HTH

Paul

 

[Brian D. Goff]

It's 2 Samsung SSD's attached to the same controller as the regular RedDrive (which contains Hitachi HDD's).

HTH

Paul

Hi Paul

Could you not hook up one ssd to the CF esata cable and get a great replacement for the cf drives?

 

[Petri Teittinen]

It's 2 Samsung SSD's attached to the same controller as the regular RedDrive (which contains Hitachi HDD's).

Thank you very much Paul, this is exactly what I wanted to find out. Based on the price of RED RAM I'm guessing they are SLC drives instead of MLC ones; two 64GB drives in a RAID 0 configuration.

 

[Tom.Wong]

Hi Paul

Could you not hook up one ssd to the CF esata cable and get a great replacement for the cf drives?

i've asked similar questions before, RED flashes a special firmware on their drives, so nothing but their drives will work.

 

[Petri Teittinen]

i've asked similar questions before, RED flashes a special firmware on their drives, so nothing but their drives will work.

Wow. That's... wow. (Frak it, I probably can't afford an Epic anyway.) That's the sort of corporate behaviour I can't tolerate. As far as I'm concerned, it's fine to use a special firmware and lock out alternatives when that special firmware achieves something tangible and positive, like a noticeable increase in performance. But when it's used simply to stop your customer base from using cheaper alternatives so you can make an extra buck... man, that's just a dick move. I know it's very easy to come to RED's defense here but face it, when you get to the bottom of it, it's a dick move.

If you ask me (and I'm aware no one does), RED should offer a choice: buy an empty enclosure with a SATA controller and a drive cable, and populate it with drives you've purchased separately from the retailer of your choice. I know, I know... "not all drives are created equal and we can't guarantee you won't experience dropped frames". I've heard that song.

But you know what? RED does not manufacture those HDDs and SSDs themselves. Their drives are not sprinkled with some magical pixie dust (well, apart from the special firmware). They are bog-standard drives from manufacturers like Hitachi and Samsung; products anyone can buy online. RED could very easily compile a short list of HDDs and SSDs they've tested and found to be fast enough, i.e. the drives they are already using, and tell their customers to spend their money on those instead of something that's $10 cheaper but 50MB/s slower. Also, the net is filled with hardware sites that benchmark all drives so it's not at all difficult to learn which drives are fast and which ones are not.

Just my $0.02, sparked by being unemployed for the past 3 months and by a strong desire to use my money wisely.

 

[Cail Young]

But you know what? RED does not manufacture those HDDs and SSDs themselves. Their drives are not sprinkled with some magical pixie dust (well, apart from the special firmware).

Except that the firmware is actually quite special; is is the reason the drives are able to perform from end to end without skipping a beat. The OEM will not sell the drives direct to you with this firmware, and encouraging customers to reflash hard drives rather than purchase the RED certified media is asking for trouble.

 

[Tom.Wong]

and can you also imagine the mayhem when people are losing precious footage or dropping frames on a million dollar shot cause they decided to use a consumer brand SSD over enterprise grade stuff?

 

[Steven Caesare]

Carefult Petri. You and other folks are making a few assumptions here.

It's been stated more than once that the firmwaqre RED uses for their media DOES have some technical differences as well... such as avoiding thermal calibrations during recording ips for spinning media, and specific cell allocation routines for the solid state media.

-sc

 

[Petri Teittinen]

Except that the firmware is actually quite special; is is the reason the drives are able to perform from end to end without skipping a beat. The OEM will not sell the drives direct to you with this firmware, and encouraging customers to reflash hard drives rather than purchase the RED certified media is asking for trouble.

Hold on. You're saying that a manufacturer is knowingly using an inferior firmware in the drives they sell all across the world, and reserves the improvements that enable the drives to perform better for RED exclusively?

Well. If that is true, it certainly falls under the "tangible and positive" I mentioned.

 

[Petri Teittinen]

and can you also imagine the mayhem when people are losing precious footage or dropping frames on a million dollar shot cause they decided to use a consumer brand SSD over enterprise grade stuff?

The folks doing a million dollar shoot can afford to buy a $4500 RED RAM. There's absolutely no need to even mention to them the possibility of DIY.

I was talking about choice, an alternative RED could offer to people who don't mind screwing around with hardware to see what happens. You know, people like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak back in the early days of Apple Computer... people like Mr. Jannard and his engineers when RED was taking its first steps.

I certainly wouldn't mind the option of finding out for myself how drives purchased off the shelf might work. And even if RED wouldn't want to make it that easy, I've certainly re-flashed enough HDD and SSD firmwares to know how it's done. Nobody's forcing others to do it. This is about choice and... well, I refuse to use the F-word here. No, not that one, the one that starts with "Fr".

 

[D Fuller]

Hold on. You're saying that a manufacturer is knowingly using an inferior firmware in the drives they sell all across the world, and reserves the improvements that enable the drives to perform better for RED exclusively?

The manufacturer's firmware is not "inferior" it's just designed for a different purpose.

Recording video is a very demanding task for a computer system, and its demanding in ways other demanding tasks are not. For example, a server needs very fast random access to perform well, but it won't usually benefit much from very fast continuous reads or writes. A 4K cinema camera, on the other hand, needs very fast continuous writes to perform at all, or you get dropped frames. That requires that drives behave differently in a number of ways -- one of them being the thermal calibration Steven mentioned above. Another is the management of recording across the SSD devices so that they don't slow down over time. For these things there really is magic pixel dust in the firmware.

RED's not out to screw you here. They have to guarantee that their camera systems work or they fail in the marketplace. (and by that I mean the big fail, where the company ceases to exist) We need them to ensure that the recording media just work. All the time. RED is fighting to establish a reputation for many things. Reliability is an important one. For that reason alone, recording media is an area where home brew is just not a good idea.

When you rent a RED, you need to be able to expect the recording media to work. If everybody were "free" to invent their own, I'd never rent a RED because I couldn't trust it.

 

[Petri Teittinen]

A 4K cinema camera, on the other hand, needs very fast continuous writes to perform at all, or you get dropped frames. That requires that drives behave differently in a number of ways -- one of them being the thermal calibration Steven mentioned above.

I know. I've hacked a HDD firmware to alter its thermal calibration behaviour.

Another is the management of recording across the SSD devices so that they don't slow down over time.

Actually, no. The slow dying of SSDs is the biggest issue facing that particular technology, and manufacturers are doing everything in their power to solve it. There's no special pixie dust reserved for RED here; the drive is already doing the best job it can.

Regarding continuous writes on SSD drives: a couple of generations old OCZ Vertex 120GB can do a sustained write up to 100MB/s with a max write performance of up to 180MB/s. The brand new Vertex 2 with its new Sandforce controller can do sustained write up to 250MB/s. These are off-the-shelf SSDs, no special firmwares required.

They have to guarantee that their camera systems work or they fail in the marketplace. (and by that I mean the big fail, where the company ceases to exist) We need them to ensure that the recording media just work. All the time.

I am absolutely not suggesting this practice should change. I'm talking about offering the choice.

When you rent a RED, you need to be able to expect the recording media to work. If everybody were "free" to invent their own, I'd never rent a RED because I couldn't trust it.

I guess asking whether they're using RED approved media is out of the question?

 

[Tom.Wong]

i think the issues with a DIY solution have a higher purpose than trying to "screw the customer" many people on the board are very happy with the RED business model, and sometimes a company has to enforce some measures to help you as the customer save you from yourself. They have talked about it thoroughly of using a variety of brands and different types of media solutions, all putting it through the vigors of capturing their format. There are simple liability issues with something as precious as your recording medium. RED's 16 gb CF cards are clearly faster and work better than any consumer CF card out there, cause they work with all their promised data rates.

Throw in a sandisk 90 mb in there, or a Lexar 600x in there, and theoretically they should be fast enough to sustain 42 mb/sec. but they don't, and thus they don't work and RED won't support it.

RED won't support alternative Canon mounts out there, they don't believe it's safe for the camera sensor, so it will void your warranty if you get a canon mount. Next gen cameras they are offering both more affordable SSD's, and their own Canon mount cause they give quality assurance.

The choice is nice, and if your DIY savvy, and believe you can do it yourself that's great to, but they need to protect a large portion of their clients, and rampant third party recording medium could bring about a lot of serious problems. If it's their drive, their tech they can solve problems and help fix it 10x faster then if you bought a third party drive rewired, reflashed off Ebay.

Also to say large productions don't do a lot of DIY i would say is false, they build a lot of special rigs and gear and tech to accomdate the shoot. Tons and Tons of stuff is ghetto rigged, as long as it works, from the most high tech of rigging to the most low tech and cheap to get the job done as quickly and fast as possible. If a producer knows they can X amount of dollars and think that it's safe when it's not, they will do so.

 

[Petri Teittinen]

They have talked about it thoroughly of using a variety of brands and different types of media solutions, all putting it through the vigors of capturing their format.

Yes, talked they have. I haven't seen any actual benchmarks to suggest all this testing has taken place. Granted, I'm sure they've tested a wide variety of CF cards to find the ones they sell, but HDDs and SSDs on the other hand...

RED's 16 gb CF cards are clearly faster and work better than any consumer CF card out there, cause they work with all their promised data rates.

RED should sell or license their CF technology to Sandisk, Lexar & co, seeing as CF cards manufactured by RED are so much better than the competition. </snark>

RED won't support alternative Canon mounts out there, they don't believe it's safe for the camera sensor, so it will void your warranty if you get a canon mount.

Yeah. Has nothing to do with media technology or what I was talking about, however.

but they need to protect a large portion of their clients, and rampant third party recording medium could bring about a lot of serious problems.

Hey, I've heard this song somewhere. Still, it's a valid point, certainly.

If it's their drive, their tech they can solve problems and help fix it 10x faster then if you bought a third party drive rewired, reflashed off Ebay.

Tom, that's nowhere near the worst case scenario you could have come up with to prop up that strawman.

Also to say large productions don't do a lot of DIY i would say is false, they build a lot of special rigs and gear and tech to accomdate the shoot.

By DIY I was referring to RED recording media only.

<<<<<<>>>>>>

Wow, this became tiresome fast. I certainly should've known better than to say anything even remotely negative about RED or its business practices on this forum.

People, I'm well aware of all the arguments, valid and less so, for what RED is doing and why it's good for both the company and its customers, OK?

But my point remains. If I know what I'm doing and I'm perfectly aware of the possible consequences, why shouldn't I be allowed the option of doing whatever it is I wish to do with the equipment I've purchased?

 

[Carsten Fenstermacher]

But my point remains. If I know what I'm doing and I'm perfectly aware of the possible consequences, why shouldn't I be allowed the option of doing whatever it is I wish to do with the equipment I've purchased?

A rental company did this in the very early days and red got blamed publically for it. The production company even tried to sue red.

I asked red about doing the same thing and the response was that both the firmware on the drives and the firmware in the camera is tuned to each other to get the realtime requirements the camera needs.

 

[Cail Young]

RED should sell or license their CF technology to Sandisk, Lexar & co, seeing as CF cards manufactured by RED are so much better than the competition.

There are millions of potential CF card buyers for Sandisk/Lexar etc. There are thousands of CF buyers for RED. The other guys have no reason to add another product line just for thousands of buyers.

The RED cards actually are markedly improved over other cards claiming similar write speeds. Just run the AJA graph test on them and it's pretty obvious.

 

[Greg Dieckhaus]

Bottomline

Bottomline

Petri is right about one thing, this conversation is tiresome. If you can't afford Red's media, don't buy their camera. It is that simple. With a typical configuration of the Red One in the $40-$50K range, it is laughable to say that the Red media is overpriced. Red is pushing the envelope of current computer technology and has partnered with specific media providers that build reliable media fitted with Red's firmware. Anyone that has spent any time using the Red One will realize that Red is not trying to rape buyers with expensive accessories. They are trying to guarantee that all of the Red owners have a positive, reliable experience with the camera.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

RED media is pretty darn cheap compared to other media types out there. Shooting to RED media and archiving to commodity HDDs and LTO tape is way cheaper than HDCAM, XDCAM, Film, etc..

As for the custom firmware on drives and SSDs and let's not forget about the CF cards too. It's about application-specific performance. It does not mean that RED is using better firmware in a general sense or anything that performs superior to what the manufacturer would install by default. It's firmware that tunes the storage device to work its best for RED's specific application. Lots of manufacturers do just this, no big deal, no conspiracies here.

As for locking out third party media, I really don't see what all the fuss is about. Sure, I'd like to be able to use dirt-cheap, off the shelf media, but RED has cover their own asses. From their perspective it's best they lock it out. They can put all the warning labels, restrictions, in-camera warnings, etc.. on there to tell people that using a non-certified media may give undesirable results. The problem is people will still do it and as soon as it drops a frame or screws up an expensive shot, people point the finger at RED or will blame the camera and not the media.

Read what Greg posted just above me. I think some people need to think about this a bit more rationally and from a business point of view.

 

[D Fuller]

I guess asking whether they're using RED approved media is out of the question?

It's not out of the question, but it's just not a good enough solution. For example, when renting a film package, an AC does a checkout. Part of that checkout is a scratch test. That's because it's irresponsibly risky just to ask if the mags are OK and go on your way. The consequences if they're not are severe. I know of no equivalent test possible with digital recording media that doesn't take an impractically long time.

I am absolutely not suggesting this practice should change. I'm talking about offering the choice.

The simple fact is that my confidence that I'm renting solidly-reliable media goes down if anybody who feels they can save a buck can cobble together any random drive into a case and slap it onto a camera. It's not about choice, it's about survival. A few horror stories would do a lot to undermine the reputation of e camera. RED, and by extension the whole RED community, can't afford for there to be that kind of uncertainty about the camera.