SATA out on REDDRIVE

[BVog]

I just went through the FAQ and started to think about my ordered REDDRIVEs the moment I realized that there is apparently no way to get data out via SATA, since the connector is a proprietary part with the REDONE and the REDDRIVE offers FW400/800 instead as outs.
Will there be a way to have an adaptor for the REDDRIVE SATA connector?

It would be far more efficient - when transferring, editing and backing up data - to have a REDDRIVE connected to a SATA Express card or a preconfigured workstation RAID, instead of using FW400/800.

Could this be an option, or are there any obstacles by soft-/hardware design in the way to have this?

Best regards
Boris

[Mark L. Pederson]

not sure that's correct -

I know the connection to the camera is proprietary - but I thought there was FW400/800 AND SATA connections on the other side of the drive for offload - now I can't remember ...

Stuart?

[PaulClements]

FireWire 800/400, USB-2 and e-SATA interfaces

[Mark L. Pederson]

FireWire 800/400, USB-2 and e-SATA interfaces

That's what I remember from NAB - can we get a RED confirmation?

Stuart -

can you tell us what the sustained READ speed of the drive inside current REDDRIVE is?

[Ramesh Jai]

That's what I remember from NAB - can we get a RED confirmation?

Stuart -

can you tell us what the sustained READ speed of the drive inside current REDDRIVE is?
How about you Paul...anyone, anyone..?

[Tonaci Tran]

Hope this helps,

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showpost.php?p=45524&postcount=3

The RED DRIVE and RED RAM digital magazines both have a mini-phono jack connector for external 12V D.C power, so in the case of an e-SATA hook up to your computer you would only need to create a LEMO to e-SATA cable.

At this point in time though, the speed of available hard disks or flash drives is still lower than that of FireWire 800, so there is no apparent advantage to this idea.
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Workflow Wizard
Last edited by Stuart English : 05-23-2007 at 12:01 PM.

Discussed before on these threads:
http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=2547

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=3288

[PaulClements]

Actually I have a feeling USB2.0 might have been removed, not too sure. The ones I listed are infact on red.com but I have a feeling there have been changes since then and simply not updated.

eSata should be 2400Mbit/s (300MB's), firewire 786Mbit/s (98.25MB/s) and USB 2.0 480Mbit/s (60MB/s) - These are not confirmed by Red, just what you should expect from each delivery format. The speed of the hdd in the redrive will probably be slower than esata though.

[Rocco Schult]

Unfortunatel I am not aware of changes to the USB2 and quite frankly that wouldn't be too intelligent to remove that one as there are PCs out there completely unaware of IEEE1394.
I am also interested in the pin-out of the Lemo-cable. I assume it might be a few percent faster, but in the end shouldn't make a remarkable difference. The SATA interface speeds in general are of no real interest, because as you mention already Paul
The speed of the hdd in the redrive will probably be slower than esata though.
its exactly like that: No 2-disc drive combo out there currently touches the headroom of SATA2 speeds. FW is 100MB/sec. and thats probably the maximum of what the little raid is able to deliver (as of current laptop drives, disregarding the performance of the raid DSP inside, which might limit the throughput anyway and wouldn't be too unusal for this special/small appliance).
I wonder if the RED-RAM stripe set could be faster than FW800s 100MB/sec, making the use of an Lemo to SATA adapter very interesting again. But I seriously doubt the controller inside goes beyond that.
If RED uses the same DSP than LaCie in its Little Big Drive, I'd assume it maxes out at 80-90 MB/sec.
Heres a test for the interested at Barefeats. (http://www.barefeats.com/hard74.html)

[Jeff Kilgroe]

RED DRIVEs have USB2.0, FW400, FW800 and DC power connectors. The DC power is there in case the drive is being connected to a system that doesn't supply bus power over the USB or FW interfaces -- many PC notebooks do not, they only have a 4pin (not-powered) firewire port.

Additionally, there is a proprietary LEMO connector that carries eSATA and power on the same cord. To connect to a system via eSATA, one would have to create a custom LEMO to SATA cable with the proper pin-out. Not sure if RED is going to make a wiring diagram available or if they will even provide such a cable. I'm sure that someone will do it.

As for drive speed, both USB2 and FW400 are plenty fast enough for the current model RED DRIVE. There will be no speed gains by going to eSATA. The RED RAM is a bit faster though -- I think, or at least faster transfer times have been mentioned as a benefit. But we're not sure how fast.. I highly doubt that a current model RED RAM will be able to saturate a SATA connection or even strain a 100MB/s FW800 interface.

[tj williams]

Jeff for those of us who are pretty computer ignorant does what you say above mean that firewire 800 will download the mag. in about 1/3 of real time? (27MB second recording rate 100 MB second firewire 800 out to portable raid)

[Brook Willard]

Copying a full RED DRIVE over FW800 to a single HD [or a mirrored RAID] should take about 2.5 hours.

[edit: I'm a doof, see below]

[Evin Grant]

FW800 is a little less than 80MB a sec. write so I'd say a full Red drive with 298GB formatted capacity should go down in just over an hour.

[Evin Grant]

Why do you think 2.5 Brook?
My math...
70MB/s x 60 =4.16 GB/min
298/4.26= 71.6min
Did I get something wrong?

[Evin Grant]

OK I found some benchmarks at Barefeats.com that put FW800 copy at about 46MB/s so that put's us right in the middle at about 110.4 Min or about an hour and 50 min.

[Brook Willard]

I'm probably a dumbass. Let me think harder.

[Brook Willard]

I do things the easy way. Copying from a FW800 striped RAID [it's old and slow... but so are 2.5" drives] to my Quad G5's internal drive took 7:00 for 20GB. That's 112 minutes total, so just under 2 hours.

That doesn't address any of the other RED DRIVE specifics, though... formatting, file structure, etc. We really just don't know.

[Scott Webster]

If you just wanted a cheap windows dub station, is it as simple as adding a 2xFW800 Express card adapter, REDDRIVE in one, out to backup FW Drive or FW Raid? Or is there a speed hit somewhere which makes this a waste of time?

Or does the whole Win Xp S2 make FW800 a no go on Win laptops? (Vista?)

[BVog]

At this point in time though, the speed of available hard disks or flash drives is still lower than that of FireWire 800, so there is no apparent advantage to this idea.
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Any external hardware RAID0 configured drive like the 500GB LaCie can take a higher throughput than FW800 delivers, I am using them for this reason,and the REDRIVE is a RAID0.

Anyway if the cable adapter option is possile that'll be fine.

[Paul Leeming]

If you just wanted a cheap windows dub station, is it as simple as adding a 2xFW800 Express card adapter, REDDRIVE in one, out to backup FW Drive or FW Raid? Or is there a speed hit somewhere which makes this a waste of time?

Or does the whole Win Xp S2 make FW800 a no go on Win laptops? (Vista?)I'm pretty sure FW800 works ok on WinXP, so I too am hoping this ExpressCard style dubbing will be a viable option for laptops, as it's what I plan to use on set to create quick backups for the client.

[BVog]

I'm pretty sure FW800 works ok on WinXP, so I too am hoping this ExpressCard style dubbing will be a viable option for laptops, as it's what I plan to use on set to create quick backups for the client.

I am working mobile with a Sony Vaio AR11S (200GB internal RAID0), and it takes my SATA2 drives via Express Card, works flawlessly and fast with XP Pro SP2 (there is definitley no use for Vista in pro domains), FW400 and 800 are supported by XP, I use a LaCie adaptor card for this.

What I am up to with the SATA2 option for REDDRIVEs is using them for this setup as well as for a workstation, where I use a SATA2 patchbay to link any external drive directly into an 4TB RAID0 configuration.

[MikeCurtis]

Guys -

factors to consider:

FireWire 800 will be the fastest bus (unless a custom eSATA adaptor is made - anybody wanna jump on that, since that's the fastest possible bus?)

IF I recall correctly, FireWire 800 is good for about 50 MB/sec writes, 80 MB/sec reads on a G5, I'm presuming that a Mac Pro will be about the same (don't have my Octo Mac, but likely to order this week).

So 80 MB/sec is your max theoretical read speed from FW800.

The catch is, can you feed it that fast? We're coming from a couple of 160GB 2.5" drives - I'm thinking from past research these were good for about 20-40 MB/sec on the slower ones that had drop/crash protection, and about 30-50 MB/sec on the faster ones. I don't know what has changed since I originally did that research for myself, nor if they are still using the drives available when they started picking gear.

Note there's a range involved- 20-40 or 30-50 - that is because drives get slower as they fill up and write to the slower inner tracks. The falloff isn't linear - it holds pretty well and then drops towards the end.

This gets into a calculus, area-under-the-curve kind of a thing to calculate accurate average transfer rates. Barring that, let's go with the average presuming it is the slower of the drives - so 30 MB/sec, per drive. There's usually about a 10% hit for a RAID config under OS X, I dunno if that applies in general, but it seems plausible. So 27 MB/sec*2=54 MB/sec average....so FW800 will be limiting transfer rates for maybe half of the transfer. So 50 MB/sec*3.6=180 GB/hr. 320/180=1.778, which is getting pretty close to the hour fifty somebody else guessed. But 320 GB RAW capacity equals 296 GB formatted (presuming they use all the space - they may partition to get the "fast enough" part they need. )But then it'll slow down below that rate at some point, and the FW800 won't be the bottleneck, the speed with which data can come off the Red Drive will. So....based on LOTS of conjecture here...circa two hours? FW400 will definitely be slower, good for only about 35 MB/sec, that'd take about 3 hours 20 min to copy over 296 GB. And that presumes you're copying to another bus with no latencies - these times are just the "read the data off with no interruptions" numbers.

In short, we're ALL guessing, not knowing the actual drives used, the actual formatted capacity, latencies involved if writing to the same bus, the machine used, the hardware involved, etc.

[Blair S. Paulsen]

With a Mac lapper I was planning to use FW800 to get the data off the RedDrive and then use an Express/34 to eSATA card to attach the mini-RAID I am copying onto. This avoids having the upstream and downstream transfer on the same bus.

The FW800 should not limit the read speed off of the RedDrives so it seems like a good match. I won't need a special connector. The eSATA tap to the external mini-RAID may be overkill for the writing of the original data but should speed up any operations I undertake with the media after the copying.

[Tonaci Tran]

I second my fellow diegan, although i'm bummed my laptop is the older gen macpro without fw800. For in studio hvx200 shoots, I use the lacie drive for logandcapturing. When I am done, I back it up to my external sata drives. I still think it is so amazing that we will be able to edit redcode raw straight off of the red drives.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Any external hardware RAID0 configured drive like the 500GB LaCie can take a higher throughput than FW800 delivers, I am using them for this reason,and the REDRIVE is a RAID0.

Anyway if the cable adapter option is possile that'll be fine.

RAID 0 doesn't necessarily mean it's that fast. And comparing with larger external RAID systems based on much faster 3.5" hard drives is not really a proper comparison for a RED drive. Several factors affect the speed of a hard disc such as rotational speed, data density, number of heads, head performance, buffers, platter size, etc.. You'll be limited by the speed of the drives in the array. Currently, the fastest 2.5" hard drives on the market can only sustain about 18MB or so across all data surfaces. So, assuming a 2x increase in speed by using two of them (which isn't going to happen), you're still looking at under 40MB/s from a RED DRIVE or somewhere about there. Not a strain on a FW800 connection.

A LEMO to SATA adapter or cable doesn't seem to me like a difficult thing to make and I'm sure someone will do it before I get my hands on my own RED kit.

[Stuart English]

I don't agree with some of the numbers quoted, but do agree that FW800 is the most convenient interconnect to your computer system.

At this time, there is little to be gained by using an e-SATA connection, but that may change in future as media gets faster.