Operating Hours readout

[fightordie]

Just curious if the RED will have a readout totaling operating hours.

[Chris Kenny]

What would be useful is if RedDrives kept track of operating hours, number of days since manufacture, number of days since first use, and possibly number of days since last use. It would also be useful if the camera could report how much life was left in solid state storage media (which allows a limited number of write operations), if that's possible.

[Jochen Schmidt-Hambrock]

This camera doesnt have a tape mechanism. Read / write cycles on solid state memory or drives are in the 100 thousands. I cant see how this would be of any use.

Jochen

[Chris Kenny]

The number of times you can write to a drive is huge, but drive life span is not. Drives start failing at significantly higher rates after 3-4 years, and it would be nice to have an easy way to tell just how old a RedDrive was and whether it had been sitting on a shelf or had been intensely used during that time period. Come to think of it, a spin-up counter would be pretty useful as well. (When drives have light duty cycles, a significant amount of the wear and tear they suffer occurs during spin-up.)

You get about a million write operations on current flash memory, and the stuff shouldn't otherwise degrade with age, so this admittedly probably isn't quite so critical.

[fightordie]

Yes we know there is no tape mechanisim. Aside from the great reasons Chris has mentioned there are also secondary financial/business reasons why an operating hour readout would be nice to have.

[Michael Morlan]

Um, why? There are no moving parts other than buttons and knobs. The connections and ports will wear at vastly varying rates depending on how they are treated. The camera will function perfectly unless treated poorly resulting in vastly different long-term value.

You want to measure button-push cycles? How 'bout port plugging cycles?

There is nothing that can be measured that affects long-term value because every camera will have a vastly different experience in the field. Motion picture film cameras are valued by their latest, documented overhaul by a reputable shop, and with test footage (hopefully) shot by the potential buyer. Just give a RED One the same review before selling/buying.

Michael

[Anders Holck]

It should be possible to get a Reddrive's Operation hours, spin up cycles, error occurences etc. using standard S.M.A.R.T reporting tools, but only if the drive is mounted to the computer using the SATA interface.

A report could look like this: Smartmontools output sample from a Maxtor ATA disk (http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/examples/MAXTOR-6.txt)

[Jeff Kilgroe]

It should be possible to get a Reddrive's Operation hours, spin up cycles, error occurences etc. using standard S.M.A.R.T reporting tools, but only if the drive is mounted to the computer using the SATA interface.

Actually, S.M.A.R.T. data would be captured from the drives by the internal drive/RAID controller in the RED DRIVE. And could be stored to onboard NVRAM or FLASH. Not saying that it will be done, but the potential is there...

Personally I don't see a need for hour read-outs on a RED DRIVE. I've dealt with tons of hard drives over the years and I've come to the conclusion that the number of service hours of a drive has little to do with failure rate. I would place more stock into the manufacture date... Older drives are more prone to failure, regardless of their usage. Or at least that's been my experience.

Seeing how I don't anticipate getting my RED until later this year and we'll have 16GB CF media by then and possibly other alternatives, I'm also starting to question even buying RED DRIVEs at all. I'll probably still buy two just to have at my disposal, but it's starting to look like my primary recording media is going to be FLASH.

[Vincent Rice]

Yes we know there is no tape mechanisim. Aside from the great reasons Chris has mentioned there are also secondary financial/business reasons why an operating hour readout would be nice to have.

Such as?

[donatello b]

are there any drive(s) that keep track of spin cycles ??

[Joe Aurili]

It might be nice to have a readout of the amount of time the camera was on. Electronics do have a life don't they? Was it on 10 hours or 10,000 hours? Does it wear out the CMOS if used huge periods of time? What if I have time lapse going 24 hours a day for months?

[Chris Kenny]

It might be nice to have a readout of the amount of time the camera was on. Electronics do have a life don't they?

Not as much as you might think. Most solid state components that fail will do so fairly early on. After that initial "burn-in" period, failures tend to be pretty random, with the number of accumulated operating hours not making a lot of difference.

[tj williams]

Coming from the camera side as I do and not all that familiar with computer innards I'm sorta In Michaels camp on this. Where do I look on my computer
(windows Xp) to find these spin up times, mfg dates, and hours of opn?
I can't find this!!! Is it on a Mac? If not then seems unreasonable to suggest that RED should do it?

[Chris Kenny]

Coming from the camera side as I do and not all that familiar with computer innards I'm sorta In Michaels camp on this. Where do I look on my computer
(windows Xp) to find these spin up times, mfg dates, and hours of opn?
I can't find this!!! Is it on a Mac? If not then seems unreasonable to suggest that RED should do it?

Drives themselves keep track of all this stuff, if they support SMART. OS X and Windows don't (as far as I know) have an interface to give you access to all this info, but there are utilities (like this one (http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/)) that will.

To provide all this info, Red just has to have the RAID controller in the RedDrive pass it through to the camera from the two drives in the package.

[Jochen Schmidt-Hambrock]

Info on read / write cycles is useless: 500 000 cycles means: If 20 times the same physical drive sector or memory space gets written to per day (Hmmm?): the drive should fail in 68 years.

I have lots of stuff in my studio. The only things with operation hour counters are tape things (DAT, DA88, multitracks, cameras)

(oh, except the audio filter F1 by Sony: It also wants to know my birthday, so it can congratulate me when I switch it on then.)

Jochen

[fightordie]

Unlike other hard drives used in ones personal life where backup is easily dealt with, failure here will be more costly and devestating than most have ever encountered.

There are moving parts in this camera. The fans. Which if you're interested in reading this article is the second most common hardware failure.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=310

[Vincent Rice]

Unlike other hard drives used in ones personal life where backup is easily dealt with, failure here will be more costly and devestating than most have ever encountered.

There are moving parts in this camera. The fans. Which if you're interested in reading this article is the second most common hardware failure.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=310

I'm sorry I don't get it. An hours meter would be useless for predicting failure modes for either discs or fans.