View Full Version : RedDrive - Creating My Own
The RedDrive is a SATA drive. Will it be possible for me to hook up my own drive or do I have to purchase RedDrives?
Price aside, there are many advantages to being able to pop in my own drive...convenience, availability, etc.
Thanks!
t-ray
Gunleik Groven
05-20-2007, 11:25 AM
stated several times that this will not be a recomended solution.
The drives will have special connectors (electricity and sata onn the same cable)
Feel free to experiment with your own gear -;)
Gunleik
Steve Freebairn
05-20-2007, 11:30 AM
The quick answer is no.
If you search the forum there are a lot (at least a few come to mind that I've read from industry leaders and from the Red team).
I'll list 2.
The connector is a sata connector and power connector built into 1, that will definitely put a damper on just using a sata drive.
Performance, the red team can't guarantee the performance of your drive/raid . They can't deal with the thousand plus combinations of drives/enclosure/raid setups. Really if you look at the options, the Red Drive is cheap for a Raid 0 enclosure that uses notebook drives that is built for serious work. Use CF and offload to a cheaper hdd if cost is really a big issue. CF, will be better suited to "rough" work (vibrations) and is actually a really great idea (congrats Red team).
Michael Schrengohst
05-20-2007, 02:11 PM
Just like everyone wanted to build their own P2 cards.
I am holding out on buying anymore P2 cards.
With the RED delivery hopefully this year I can hold
off purchasing a 16 gig card for $900 - I would rather
buy a 320 gig RED drive for $900!!
Gunleik Groven
05-20-2007, 02:18 PM
Good-one!
Anyone bought a FireStore around here?
-;)
Just for the record: I'm plenty happy with mine.
G
tj williams
05-20-2007, 05:35 PM
Commenting here is outa my comfort zone as I'm not to ... about digital stuff.
but here goes....
First won't the raid 0 in the 320gb RED Magazine, lose its data if one of the two drives fails? Isn't that what raid 5 etc is about? How many of those little 160gb drives would you have to loop together in a hot swappable redundant raid to get the necessary speed?
Since the camera is so small for dolly work, or where there is the crew to move a panavision size camera, wouldn't it make sense to have a magazine which could not fail???
Sure this gets the comment buy the expensive solid state one. But on another thread many of the potential users are boasting about not having to change mags so much. Here is probably a bad example of a raid that seems to me to run out the compact flash port?
http://www.xpcgear.com/readynas610.html or maybe from a n express card 34 port?
http://www.pcnation.com/web/details.asp?affid=808&item=L48946
This also brings up a related set of questions I can't find the answer to:
1. what happens when the battery goes flat?
2. What happens when you change the battery? (reset?)
3. When you put a new mag up is it just plug n play or you hafta.....
J. Bernard Vallon
05-21-2007, 07:04 AM
Yes you would loose all your data if one of the drives in a REDdrive fails. A RAID 0 has a higher fault rate than a single drive.
I believe you would need 2 reddrives mirroring each other for full fault tolerance. I'm pretty sure you cant make a RAID 5 with just 3 drives, I think you need 4, but I could be wrong.
Currently daisy chaining reddrives (hooking one into the other so they both record the same data at the same time) isn't supported, but if i were a REDDude, its something I would be looking into (so i'm sure they are too).
Stuart English
05-21-2007, 07:25 AM
Q:
1. what happens when the battery goes flat?
2. What happens when you change the battery? (reset?)
3. When you put a new mag up is it just plug n play or you hafta.....
A:
1 & 2. The camera gracefully shuts down.
3. If its already formatted then its plug and play, if its not, the camera will format the drive for you.
Steve Freebairn
05-21-2007, 02:09 PM
One other thing to mention is that the Red Team is using 2.5 laptop drives which are more durable than the 3.5 inch drives. So, they should hold up a lot better. Raid 5 can be done with 3 drives, but they'd need a lot more drives and it would cost a lost more. In the future, I'm sure the Red team will make an update to the camera to enable dual recording to CF and the red drive. All of us Reservation holders above 1000 are hoping to get early warning of any impending problems such as hard drive failures a few months before it happens to us :help:
Thom Steinhoff
05-21-2007, 05:07 PM
...If its already formatted then its plug and play, if its not, the camera will format the drive for you.
Hopefully it will ask you to confirm the reformatting before blasting away. I would hate to put a card in, thinking/knowing it has footage on it (got it confused with my SLR CF?) and for whatever reason the camera thinks it needs to be formatted.
I would like to have the option to say "no, thank you very much" and pull it out to investigate further.
This sort of thing has happened to me with portable hard drives and, though I cringe when the "format are you sure?" message comes up--but at least I have a chance to cringe!
Stuart English
05-21-2007, 05:25 PM
"I would like to have the option to say "no, thank you very much" and pull it out to investigate further"
But of course .....
Thanks! Question answered.
Don't get me wrong...I'm a HUGE fan. Even placed an order. I guess I'll stick with one RedDrive and hope I can offload to my NLE's RAID without significant down time.
Chris Forbes
05-22-2007, 11:59 AM
I just had an AaHa moment.
Firewire 800 goes at about 1 gig a minute.
ESata Connectors are noticeably faster. (3 times I believe)
Can we have a Y adapter to hook the Esata port on the REDDRIVE to an esata card on a desktop or laptop and an AC power Adapter, to shorten offload times?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#eSATA_compared_to_other_buses
TimothyD
05-22-2007, 12:39 PM
I just had an AaHa moment.
Firewire 800 goes at about 1 gig a minute.
ESata Connectors are noticeably faster. (3 times I believe)
Can we have a Y adapter to hook the Esata port on the REDDRIVE to an esata card on a desktop or laptop and an AC power Adapter, to shorten offload times?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA#eSATA_compared_to_other_buses
Yeah, what he said!!!
:)
Jeff Kilgroe
05-22-2007, 01:18 PM
FW800 is going to be plenty fast for the RED Drive. Just because SATA is a faster interface, doesn't mean that the drives themselves can actually use all that bandwidth.
OTOH, a way to connect the RED DRIVE and especially the RED RAM to a computer via eSATA would be a welcome option.
Chris Forbes
05-22-2007, 01:43 PM
The pin configuration shouldn't be that tough. It will be getting the REDTEAM to build the functionality into the RedDrive to transfer data both directions.
BTW I don't know of any drives out there that can't swamp Firewire 800's bandwith. Especially in a raid array. Maybe I'm wrong ( I frequently am )
http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage25.html Data Transfer Rates on 2.5 in HD
Axel Mertes
05-22-2007, 02:52 PM
FW800 is going to be plenty fast for the RED Drive. Just because SATA is a faster interface, doesn't mean that the drives themselves can actually use all that bandwidth.
OTOH, a way to connect the RED DRIVE and especially the RED RAM to a computer via eSATA would be a welcome option.
Many drives go up to 50 to 90 MByte/second for a single drive. Thats just for SATA drives. Most 2.5" models are just around 40 to 60 MByte/second in SATA mode, but the latest SAS (identical connectors) models go up to 108 MByte/second for 2.5" drives. That makes clearly 200 MByte/second on a RAID0 combination if done right. FireWire800 will bottleneck at ~75 MByte/second by its nature.
Cheers,
Axel
Jeff Kilgroe
05-22-2007, 03:36 PM
Many drives go up to 50 to 90 MByte/second for a single drive. Thats just for SATA drives. Most 2.5" models are just around 40 to 60 MByte/second in SATA mode, but the latest SAS (identical connectors) models go up to 108 MByte/second for 2.5" drives.
...Yes, but those are advertised max rates. Show me a 2.5" drive that can sustain 50MB/s or better across the entire platter surfaces. Oh wait, none exist right now. Oh, well. :sad:
As of right now, talking about 2.5" hard drives and two of them in a striped array, FW800 is more than adequate. I wish there were faster drives out there, but there aren't. Perhaps in a few more months when we see the higher density 200GB 7200rpm units and the 240GB and larger 5400rpm drives. Then it will be time to re-evaluate.
But like I said before, I'd still welcome an adapter or cable to connect the RED DRIVE to a computer via eSATA. More options = better. And faster drives (hence, faster RED DRIVEs) are just around the corner.
Martin Drew
05-23-2007, 06:18 AM
I'm pretty sure you cant make a RAID 5 with just 3 drives, I think you need 4, but I could be wrong.
Only 3 disks are required for conventional Raid 5 though you can add more.
M
Damien Molineaux
05-23-2007, 02:01 PM
Only 3 disks are required for conventional Raid 5 though you can add more.
M
Yes, but if I'm not mistaken RAID5 is slow. What you need is RAID10, which requires 4 drives. Might not be that hard to do. Red One could maybe be updated for this, just stick two Red drives and a cable splitter which writes to the two drives at the same time.
Cheers,
Damien
Adrian T.
05-23-2007, 03:19 PM
Yes, but if I'm not mistaken RAID5 is slow. What you need is RAID10, which requires 4 drives. Might not be that hard to do. Red One could maybe be updated for this, just stick two Red drives and a cable splitter which writes to the two drives at the same time.
RAID 5 is not necessarily slow. On a RAID 5 set with n drives (at least 3) the striped data can be read from n-1 drives simultaneously. A RAID 10 (can be any even number of drives, at least 4) is a striped set of mirrored drives. So if it consists of n drives, data can be read from n/2 drives simultaneously. So a RAID 5 with 3 drives has approximately the same speed as a RAID 10 with 4 drives when reading data.
Writing data is a different thing though. A RAID 10 set with 4 drives can write approximately twice as fast as you could write on a single one of its drives. A RAID 5 set is much slower than that because it also needs to read from the drives in order to recalculate the parity bits.
To sum it up, for fast writing purposes a RAID 10 is better than RAID 5. But it needs more drives (always twice the amount of space you can use). If you use the RAID mainly for reading, I recommend a RAID 5. It only needs a single spare drive, the rest is your storage amount.
As for your suggestion with the cable splitter: it's not that easy, unfortunately. :wink:
And in the end you'd have a RAID 0+1 (a mirrored set of striped pairs), not a RAID 10 :wink:
Blayne Gorum
05-23-2007, 03:23 PM
Firewire 800 specs at 100MBs a second. Reality places it more like 80-85MBs per second. Two raided 2.5" SATA drives might--emphasis on might-- max your bandwidth. More likely they will peak at about 80MBs and average more like 65MB per second.
The bottom line is that for the current generation. Firewire 800 is just fine for the current Red Drive.