Drive LEMO to eSATA Cable Released - Warranty Killer?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I figured someone would be offering such a cable sooner or later. It is not approved by RED, so use at your own risk. I don't see it speeding up transfers from the RED Drive as it doesn't saturate the FW800 bus as it is anyway. But this is just another connectivity option that could prove useful. Perhaps it will speed up transfers from the RED RAM as it's a bit faster and comes close to saturating the FW800 bus on offloads.

Last time I checked, warranties on RED media were only 90 days anyway. ...Just sayin'

[Joel Kaye]

I don't see it speeding up transfers from the RED Drive as it doesn't saturate the FW800 bus as it is anyway.

I have a mybook drive 1GB with both fw800 and eSata. For some reason eSata is way faster. I haven't timed it, but I remember I had a 30 minute estimated time transfer that went down to 10 minutes when I switched to eSata. I couldn't believe it. Maybe it's a driver thing or another factor but I'd say testing this cable is the only way to know for sure.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Lots of factors affect the speed of drives, hardware interfaces, software or drivers, operating environment...

With the RED Drive and the 160GB 5600rpm drives inside, they push about 40MB/s each as a maximum. In RAID-0 there's a theoretical max of about 78~80MB/s with real world performance usually falling a bit short of that. Currently FW800 from the RED drive tops out at about 75MB/s on a good host controller. So we're looking pretty good. eSATA being a bit more efficient may squeeze another 1 or 2 MB/s out of it, maybe. I'm thinking that we'll see a noticeable speed up for RED-RAM offloads though.

As for the mybook drive or other similar products. That's a different animal. They have notoriously poor performing Firewire interfaces (especially FW800) and the eSATA connectivity is often a straight pipe right to the drive's native SATA interface.

Anyway, a cable like this seems like a nice option to have in the kit. I really wish RED would've included an eSATA connector on the RED Drive / RED RAM. I'm assuming they didn't because the SATA interface is already incorporated into the camera LEMO plug and adding a second SATA connector could cause more problems than it's worth.

[Dane Brehm]

I just bought the New Red-to Esata cable today! I'm presently on a Feature in Aspen Colorado shooting on 3 Red's. Raffi@CoolCameraGear HOOKED IT UP! The R2E Cable will arrive Tomorrow ( I love FREE shipping). I'm seriously Geekingout about this new cable. Everyone On-Set has no Idea how cool this is for the Cinema Data Tech's out there.

I'm presently using a 17' MBP w/ 4GB RAM and a Sonnet esata Card.

Stay Tuned I'll be posting some benchmarks tomorrow on the New R2E cable.



Dane Brehm
DIT : Data Supervisor
"Cougar Hunting"

[CJ Roy]

Dane-

Very cool, keep us posted. If all goes well, I'll pick one up for the feature I start next week.

-CJ

[Dane Brehm]

I'm on Day 8 of 30 during the End of Ski Season in Aspen, Colorado on "Cougar Hunting". Were using Keslow Camera's Red Drives which according to Jeff Kilroe (what up) may or may not help me.

Back in LA I'm using 2 Red-Rams so I'll see how much of a difference I'm already getting from those sexy beasts.

I attached the DIT Cart for Kicks...

[Birns and Sawyer]

These cables will be available from Birns and Sawyer at our booth C3447 as well as at the REDuser event. We will have them in stock in our Hollywood store after NAB.

In our limited, non-scientific tests, the eSATA interface mounted the drive faster and the transfer was noticeably quicker.

[Raffi Kryszek]

Hello everyone
It brings me great pleasure to announce that the R2E LEMO to eSATA Cable is Available now online from CoolCameraGear.com and through Birns and Sawyer Inc in Hollywood.
As evidenced by this thread, the ability to offload footage over eSATA has been on the wish list of RED users since the camera’s inception, and we are thrilled to make that wish come true with the R2E cable.

The R2E LEMO to eSATA cable lifts the burden off of a computer’s FireWire 800, FireWire 400 or USB buss. By simply powering the RED-Drive™ or RED-RAM™ using the original power adapter, plugging the LEMO end of the R2E cable into the drive and the other end into a standard eSATA port, the user gains instant access to RED footage with eSATA performance.

Check out the R2E Cable and other high-end, quality cinema accessories for RED and other camera systems at www.CoolCameraGear.com or visit Birns and Sawyer Inc in their Hollywood store.
Thanks
Raffi Kryszek
www.CoolCameraGear.com
http://twitter.com/coolcameragear

[Noah Richoz]

Can't wait to try it out! I average about 350GB per day on set and this would be a great help.