Red Drive - votes for hot-swap SATA support

[TimothyD]

Hello everyone,

I'd like to suggest that the kind folks at Red consider helping us all out by making the Red Drive or a variant thereof that allows us to buy off-the-shelf SATA drives and pop them into trays for hot-swap. I'm wondering how many others on the forum support that idea?

This would make the Red Drive about 90% more affordable for me to use. It would also greatly simplify workflow for those of us who won't be able to afford multiple Red drives. I for instance could just bring drives with me for my shoots and not ever worry about whether I needed to stop shooting for prolonged periods to dump the footage to another drive.

I also mentioned in a related thread about RAM buffers that I think that it would be very wise to add a gig or two of RAM either internally, or built into the Red Drive enclosure that could work as a buffer to avoid damage to the drive during periods of excessive movement. I would imagine this would only add about 100-200 to the price, so it definitely has my vote. Anyone else feel like this is something important for Red to consider? (or maybe they already have:)

Thanks,

Tim

[Jarred Land]

The problem with that is that there becomes no quality control and people would start trying to record onto 4000rpm crappy drives.. and when all their footage gets corrupt they would come to us crying.

Trust me though tim... When pricing is announced tomorrow, this will become less of an issue for you.

Shooting drives record for aprox. 2 1/2 hours remember... and you can offload those to off the shelf drives.

[tj williams]

Hi Jarred

Sears once replaced a saw one of the guys dropped off a third floor roof. I was amazed, cause the case was cracked, and he came back with a new saw in a box!

If I drop my RED I don't expect them to buy it back! If a person were fool enough to put in a drive without the proper spec. Then how could they

come to us crying.

you'd be LOL

I work in a lot of remote areas, drives can fail, I'm also interested in wanting to be able to replace drives in the housing, Failing that one could always go to the local computer store and put up a 0 raid, convert fm SDI card, then be recording on a string. Nicer to swap drives!

Your issue of quality control IMO would include say... My tripod breaks, then doe's RED have a responsiblility for the broken camera? I don't think so either.

[TimothyD]

Ok, well I was already curious, but now I'm that much more eager to see the pricing. Considering I have a grand budgeted for the drive, then I'll be very happy to see how many drives I can squeeze into that budget. If you guys somehow have them come in at or near retail price for a SATA drive, that will rock.

I still strongly urge thinking about a RAM buffer though for the drive. And since you didn't address that part of my post, I am guessing you either are already working on something like that, or know it is a non-issue for some other reason. I somehow doubt that the 16 MB stock buffer on the drive is going to cut it when I am running and gunning:) So this is a real concern for me, and incidentally, the Flash drive is going to be too spendy for me, so that will not be an option. I wish it were, but it's not. So I just want to put it out there that I think this would be really important to think about (unless you already have, and I don't realize it.)

Tim

[Justin O'Neill]

It would probably be possible to have the camera check the drive when you put one in and make sure it meets the requirements. It might be too complex to be worth it though.

I do agree with Tim though, it would be awesome just to be able to pop our own drives in.

[MikeCurtis]

TJ/Timothy - I'm with Jarred on this one - if Red allows users to do whatever, somebody will do it wrong and then blame Red that it is busted - so let it go. They are pushing the bounds of what is possible hard enough that they can't let anything go in there, because not just anything will work. As for repairs, if you broke your car engine and tried to repair it yourself would it still be under warranty?

Just buy a second one as a spare, and in any case these things will hold enough and cost little enough you shouldn't be sweating it.

Obendega - why should they go to all that work to provide a solution they make no money from, that may not work, that they can't vouch for, when there is an affordable solution that they stand behind already available?

-mike

[Mark B.]

Why not just have the R1 do a test when a drive is newly inserted... if the data rate won't keep up then the camera could display "Insufficient Drive Performance... Buy A Better Harddrive!" or some message like that. The users would get the gist of it and wouldn't have to hassle Red about recording problems.

[Mike the beginner]

With mike on this one. I am all for savings wherever possible but i am sure once you guys see the red drive as a finished article you will be persauded. why risk saving a couple of hundred dollers for something that "might" work and could be ruined if you happened to er..drop it before you transferred the foootage. Too much risk not enough reward i think.

Mike the beginner

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I'm in agreement with Jarred/RED and MikeCurtis.

Additionally, we won't know the cost of the RED DRIVE just yet. All that we know is that <under $1000> for 360GB which is several months old. Something tells me it's going to be less than that $1K figure. But realistically, look at what it's made of. 2 * 160GB 2.5" 5400rpm drives - those go for about $110 each these days. Then there's a custom enclosure and internal RAID controller, USB2, Firewire and eSATA interfaces (presumably) and who knows what else. Comparing to other hard drive solutions on the market, I don't think the price will be that bad and even approaching $1K, it's not really out of line.

Allowing for drop-in replacement of drives just opens up too many variables and you probably won't save all that much money in the long run.

Oh, and compared to other HDD based camera storage like the FireStore, Citidisk, JVC HDD110, and upcoming CinePorter, the RED DRIVE is a real bargain (arguably it doesn't do as much though other than sustain the 30MB/s or so needed). And it's cheaper than P2 cards any day. Panasonic still thinks 4 high grade SD chips with an interleaving memory controller is worth almost $150/GB. Now that's nuts.

[Justin O'Neill]

@Mike

I agree with you that it wouldn't be in the company's best interest and it would be probably one of those things that would raise the price of the camera anyways.

However, it would be awesome to just pop a drive in, record, and then pop it out and hand it to the client. Maybe I am alone in this.