Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • 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 :)

why not place 120GB SSD drives in the red drive and call it a day?

O

Obin Olson

Well-known member
Joined
Dec 28, 2006
Messages
2,004
Reaction score
0
Points
0
Website
www.dv3productions.com
Yes, too many problems. The firmware of the camera and REDraid (including the drives and the drives specific firmware revisions) are tuned to each other. If it were as trivial as dropping in a random SSD, we've have shipped RED Rams a long time ago.
 
Aren't there issues that need to be addressed with Solid State Drives anyway? I've read that they wear out quickly compared to normal drives.
 
Deanan,
can I read from this that you are working on a ssd solution? In which case I am probably not the only one to wonder: is there a timeframe when they might come?

We're doing a lot of interviews and CF cards are not an option, and spinning discs in a raid 0 are indeed a bit scary.
 
We have a few prototype RED Ram's out in field testing. We're close on a release but are waiting on some final changes to the Raid boards and firmware on the SSDs.
 
Even 96 gigs would be nicer... especially for $4,500.
Cannot WAIT to ditch the hard drives.
Will the Red Ram solve the codec error fault?
High speeds?
Cheers,
Harry
 
Deanan said:
We have a few prototype RED Ram's out in field testing. We're close on a release but are waiting on some final changes to the Raid boards and firmware on the SSDs.
Click to expand...

Deanan,
Do you foresee a day when you'll be able use off the shelf storage devices without firmware modification, in your storage devices?
David
 
$4500 for a 64gb Red Ram?? http://www.red.com/store/product_detail/74

Come'on guys, that *might* have made sense 2+ years ago at NAB 06, but when you can get retail 120gb SSD for $650, I would expect a 120gb RedRam for $1500, maybe $2000 if it came in great wrapping paper.

But $4500? Let's not go all Arri :-)
 
david farland said:
Deanan,
Do you foresee a day when you'll be able use off the shelf storage devices without firmware modification, in your storage devices?
David
Click to expand...

There is a lot of QC and testing/verification that goes into the media (flash, cf, spinning) and there are a ton of potential camera problems that can happen with random unqualified media. We see a significant fallout with a much larger sample size on both our internal QC process and from customer support. The risk grows very quickly as the samples size grows with respect to SSD quality, SSD firmware revisions, and rolling product changes to SSD part. Couple that with camera firmware changes and you have a recipe for a support nightmare.
 
Deanan said:
The risk grows very quickly as the samples size grows with respect to SSD quality, SSD firmware revisions...
Click to expand...

With the likely future growth in SSD's, do you see the SDD market becoming very similiar to CF cards, where there are many contenders but few matching Red's requirements?
 
I believe Samsung announced a 256Gig SSD yesterday for delivery later this year. They were claiming very fast read and write rates. I was thinking it would be perfect for the RED.

"This week, Samsung announced a new NAND Flash Solid State Disk which packs 256GB into a 2.5" form factor with blisteringly fast read and write performance. It will sample in September, enter mass production by year's end, and purportedly be much cheaper per gigabyte than existing SSDs."

from http://arstechnica.com/journals/har...unches-256gb-ssd-flip-flops-on-slc-versus-mlc

I hope we can get this on the RED too.
 
Shawn Nelson said:
$4500 for a 64gb Red Ram?? http://www.red.com/store/product_detail/74

Come'on guys, that *might* have made sense 2+ years ago at NAB 06, but when you can get retail 120gb SSD for $650
Click to expand...

Those are based on MLC flash which are cheap but are also significantly slower for writes and have about 1/20th the number of write cycles. They also have a much much higher likelihood of errors as you use them more.

MLC is the main reason why almost all of the 16 and 32 GB CF cards are way too slow.
 
I would suspect that Red is tweaking the media's firmware to disable any hidden write-caching it may perform. Drives, SSDs and Cards aren't really designed to write at their maximum speed non-stop for several hours. They can typically ask the controller that's feeding them the data to slow down while they catch up. That's not an option when you're recording 4K.

Hopefully some of the new stuff coming out will have such high sustained write rates that this will become unnecessary.
 
Put four of these in a ruggedized case for backup while traveling.
Transfer to X at the hotel?
Even though they aren't optomized for for onboard RED, perhaps they might make a sweet location backup in RAID 5 or such.

Hey B, how did the trip go?
 
JDHolloway said:
Put four of these in a ruggedized case for backup while traveling.
Transfer to X at the hotel?
Even though they aren't optomized for for onboard RED, perhaps they might make a sweet location backup in RAID 5 or such.
Click to expand...

It's a pretty expensive way to get a Terabyte of storage! Your location backup system is limited by the ruggedness of the most delicate part - which at this point would definitely be the MacBook. We were on mountain roads in Indonesia that made me decide to close up the MacBook before one of the crazy bumps crashed my hard drive. A better location-backup strategy is to have enough cards that you never have to reuse them within a shoot day. We have gone a step further and do not reuse media until our third backup drive has been Fedexed to the editor and signed off on.

JDHolloway said:
Hey B, how did the trip go?
Click to expand...

It's still going. On a down week in Toronto before part 2 starts. Learning lots, seeing lots, working hard, losing weight :-)

The Reds with Sim's mods are working great. They are a real pleasure to shoot with A set of Master Primes and the Arri LW zoom certainly helps.

I'll have a full report when I find some time.
 
what about blowing in a SSD for the HyperDrive in the 120G fashion would that not make it FAR more stable for CF card offloading? I was just shooting for 10 hours in a chopper and man o man do hard disks HATE helicopters! the HyperDrive goes from 12/MB/sec write to 3/MB/sec write in a chopper and I am scared to death it's drive will fail any moment with that type of write conditions!!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top