Bad HD's and Battery Mount. Has Anyone Replaced Their Own Drives?

[Ken Martini]

I have had 2 drive failures. One covered by guarantee, the latest not. We handle our equipment gently. In fact my notebooks which get knocked around have never had a drive failure.

I have asked Red if I can replace the HD drives myself since they say that is the problem. I will know soon if that is the case. I won't be voiding a warranty since there is none. Has anyone replaced their hard drives?

I just had my battery mount upgraded along with the general upgrade. One of my batteries did not work on the camera when it came back, but worked on other devices. The problem was one of the pins on the upgraded V mount had too small of a diameter and did not seat snugly in the female connector of the battery. I expanded the pin with a small tapered pick tool. That fixed that.

I have had my share of replacement parts, thankfully, most were free. I am hoping that this trend does not continue now that everything is out of warranty.

[Paul Hazlett]

Red has stated that the drives firmware is tweaked to work with the drive so...but since
your warranty is over....

[James Milner-Smyth]

Ken

I would think only Red can replace your hard drives. In order to guarantee that any Red media works as well as they should the serial number of the drives is almost certainly programmed into the Raid controller's firmware. Even if you tried to find the exact same model of hard drive the chances are the raid will not just magically rebuild itself with foreign drives. So you are not just paying Red for the bare drives, but for the time an engineer is going to spend replacing them, reprogramming the firmware and more than likely testing them. $250 for doing that (if you take off the cost of the drives) does not seem unreasonable to me.

Of course, if you are out of warranty, no law will stop you trying but just a heads up to save you possibly wasted time and $100 of drives.

Best

James M-S

[Nick Gardner]

The red drives have been successfully replaced by individuals. Search the forum, there is a thread about it somewhere. I think it was an Italian guy. If you PM him he'll give you the details.

Nick

[Julio Quintana]

A good friend of mine knows a guy who replaced his hard drives with solid state drives, essentially turning them into RED RAM. He swears it's the same thing but I'm not a computer guy so I have no idea.

[NateWeaver]

If you hard drives are dying then maybe someone on your crew is not treating them well.

I think that's a little presumptuous. I think quite a few here have had hard drives from computers, either internal or external, fail a bit sooner than expected.