Odyssey 7Q: aftermarket SSDs ?

Dan Keaton, who I respect very much, provided a number of reasons ConvergentDesign feels they must insist on using their proprietary SSDs. See page 1 of this thread.

My opinion still is the same: bad idea.

In the time since the announcement of Odyssey 7/7Q (none of which are shipping still, as of this writing), competitors like Blackmagic flooded the market with their rather excellent cameras (talking about image quality here), reliably writing 2.5K uncompressed RAW DNGs on pedestrian SSDs like SanDisk.

I'm yet to encounter any sign of trouble with that scenario.

On top of it, BMPCC records cDNG RAW (mathematically lossless) to SDXC cards. Proprietary SSDs? ... crickets...

One might speculate that in an effort to pack as many features as possible into the Odysseys, CD got tied up with the highest common denominator, 4K RAW there, which might be problematic for off-the-shelf SSDs.

Question is, how many people actually need that in their market?

And for those who don't (a majority at this time), why force them too to use proprietary SSDs?
 
Why risk damaging your 7Q or mess up a shoot to save a hundred bucks or so on 3rd party SSDs? Probably not worth it.

When things are proprietary, they tend to work better. Look at Apple vs. PC. Yes, you pay a premium for Apple, but everything just works really well together and is easy to setup. PC's, you can pick and choose your parts for cheaper, but there is definitely more compatibility issues.

For me, I just like knowing what I have will not mess up on a shoot. That's worth a good chunk of change right there IMO.
 
Don't know how you got the idea that the Odyssey7Q is not yet shipping. We've delivered more than 1,000.

Reasons for having to use Convergent Design SSDs.

1 - It's physically impossible. We have our own handle we mount on the end of the SSD which is also the latching mechanism to hold it in place on the Odyssey. Somehow stick another drive in there and it may drop in there and you can't get it out or it may not stay in place and just slide right back out, mover delivering a reliable locking connection.

2 - We test every one on an Odyssey test bench to make sure there is full compatibility with all of the file types, sizes and data rates we spec.

3 - Our SSDs maintain required minimum speeds. Many manufacturers fudge their specs for media, noting Read/Write speeds for peak usage instead of continuous (like revving your engine v. cruising), as well as referencing speeds for when a drive is completely empty and on an early cycle of use. We have tested SSDs that drop their data rate by more than half as they approach just 50% capacity. We've tested other drives that were fine for the first hundred or so cycles, and then dropped in data rates precipitously. These are why frames get dropped and recorders get bad reps when it's really the fault of the media.

4 - This to me is really the most important one: Our drives are power-protected. On other systems if the power should fail in mid-record, the file could be corrupted. In some cases it is possible that THE ENTIRE DRIVE IS CORRUPTED. Think about that one for a second. Our SSDs have a built-in protection circuit that functions in concert with a driver on the Odyssey itself. Should the power somehow fail in mid-record (cable kick out, battery pulled), there is enough juice to close out the file. Likely when power is restored, the Odyssey will go through a short auto-recovery process, rebuilding the directory. Worst case scenario you may lose a couple seconds right before power failed, but you won't lose the shot and you won't lose the drive.


Please trust me when I say that Convergent Design is not looking to get rich off selling our own SSDs. We just want to deliver a reliable solution to the users of our products.
 
Mitch Gross said:
Don't know how you got the idea that the Odyssey7Q is not yet shipping. We've delivered more than 1,000.
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I heard Philip Bloom received one, but are you saying you are now commercially shipping Odyssey 7Q now in the hundreds - how? B&H still shows pre-order only.

You know people are buying SmallHD OLED monitors (monitor only, AND more expensive than even Odyssey 7Q) because yours is not yet available?
 
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TheDingo said:
This seems pretty reasonable to me. ( and more affordable than Panasonic's P2 cards )
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If I understand correctly, and they are running raid 0, you cannot offload footage from one while the other is still recording. You'd need another set of drives to keep shooting while offloading.
 
PrimeHD said:
I heard Philip Bloom received one, but are you saying you are now commercially shipping Odyssey 7Q now in the hundreds - how? B&H still shows pre-order only.

You know people are buying SmallHD OLED monitors (monitor only, AND more expensive than even Odyssey 7Q) because yours is not yet available?
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Perhaps B&H shows pre-order because they have such a huge backorder that they have still not yet worked their way through it. We are shipping in large quantity every week, but we are also receiving lots of new orders every week. If no one was to order another Odyssey7Q we would catch up in a couple of months if not less, but the orders really do keep rolling in. When we begin shipping the Odyssey7 soon I expect the demand to be huge as well. We are actively looking into ways to increase our production output while maintaining our QC process. But the fact is that we began shipping Odyssey7Qs to dealers at the end of October 2013.
 
Sheldon Charron said:
If I understand correctly, and they are running raid 0, you cannot offload footage from one while the other is still recording. You'd need another set of drives to keep shooting while offloading.
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It depends on what mode you are shooting. On really high frame rates or other heavy data loads we stripe across two drives, otherwise we record to one drive at a time. Most work would be to a single drive.

It is not configured as a raid. Generally we put even frames on one drive and odd frames on the other. We have a merge program for free download on our website. By separating the frames in this way the merge literally takes just a few seconds to put everything together in a proper single file.
 
Here in sweden its more than just a couple of hundred bucks. A 512 GB ssd from CD costs 1400$ incl. Vat compared to a samsung 840 pro 512 GB that costs barely 500$ invl. Vat.
 
Hi guys,
I just wanted to give props to Convergent Design and vouch their great, well engineered products. I am a Gemini owner (future Odyssey owner) and while the drives might be expensive, I am ultimately paying for their reliability knowing that they've built a complete system that is thoroughly tested to repair itself for that one moment when things fail. I've had the power get clipped while filming, it was a scary experience, but sure enough the drive rebuilt itself. Their fail safe measures provide me with piece of mind knowing their gear is built to handle that inevitable moment.

When a client is paying me a good chunk of change to deliver a professional product, I can't just turn around and say oops... "ya know that last half hour of footage we captured at golden hour...well it's gone. 'cause the battery died. sorry...' My reputation is on-the-line during high pressure shoots, so I need to show up with gear that not only works well, but is bullet proof in crazy situations. A few years ago I spent the same amount on just a plain vanilla hdsdi viewing monitor, now we get a waveform, v-scope, histogram, rgb parade, OLED, etc... so we're kinda spoiled to have all these riches in technology. While it may seem tempting to cheap out for a few hundred bucks for an alternative hard drive, the extra money clients might spend on me, is the money in turn I spend for solid engineering & software integration that affords me the piece of mind to assure them everything is cool, should problems arise.

I agree with the PC/MAC analogy.
Sure, I can save a little cash to cobble together, jerry-rig, or macgyver a piecemeal system that could comparatively work 90% of the time, but I prefer to get a tested turnkey system that just works because it's that 10% that ruins reputations & future jobs. The CD engineering team has done all the hard work, and I can't imagine the thousands of man hours put into the Odyssey, but I appreciate the work they've put into it. I don't mind spending a few extra bucks to use their integrated gear because it keeps my clients happy, and keeps my own reputation intact when the **** hits the fan. It also affords me more time to actually shoot, rather than fiddling at home beta-testing random firmware conflicts with hardware that wasn't purposefully designed for the situation.
 
Give us the option

Give us the option

I believe the Mac analogy is reversed. Mac has been known for being ultra propitiatory which is why PC has become dominate. PCs only require you to do some homework when assembling the components to verify compatibility but these days it has become so easy its hardly a chore. If you use cheap components then you can expect equal results. I have a PC which cost less than a Macbook pro which will run circles around one and has never crashed (which can't be said for every macbook owner I know) even though I hand selected the components. Macs use other vendor's components and put them in a machine just like a PC except that they don't write drivers for anything they don't sell. Mac computers have yesterday's technology with tomorrow's tech prices. When new tech comes out you can't just swap components. SSD tech is evolving everyday and they are becoming faster and more efficient all the time. There are countless SSDs that have remarkable reliability that are faster and run cooler than the Toshiba drives which CD uses. The idea of the CD SSDs being propitiatory goes against what the 7q is...an alternative to Sony's recorder. If Sony remained propitiatory then the 7Q wouldn't be what it is today. As far as harming the company's reputation I don't believe that. Just like a faulty SDI cable or battery could cause incorrect operation an SSD which does not meet the specifications would be no different. If a person uses an aftermarket SSD and then its at their own risk just as using the 7Q is at the user's risk over using the Sony raw recorder. I believe that CD is doing a disservice by limiting what we can use and also makes the 7Q vulnerable to becoming outdated quickly (especially if CD goes defunct which I hope never happens but stuff does happen) as faster and larger capacity SSDs become available which cost much less than the CD SSDs. I don't mind doing my homework and finding SSDs that meet the requirements and take the risk.
 
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jjmonns said:
SSD tech is evolving everyday and they are becoming faster and more efficient all the time. There are countless SSDs that have remarkable reliability that are faster and run cooler than the Toshiba drives which CD uses. The idea of the CD SSDs being propitiatory goes against what the 7q is...an alternative to Sony's recorder. If Sony remained propitiatory then the 7Q wouldn't be what it is today. As far as harming the company's reputation I don't believe that. Just like a faulty SDI cable or battery could cause incorrect operation an SSD which does not meet the specifications would be no different. If a person uses an aftermarket SSD and then its at their own risk just as using the 7Q is at the user's risk over using the Sony raw recorder. I believe that CD is doing a disservice by limiting what we can use and also makes the 7Q vulnerable to becoming outdated quickly (especially if CD goes defunct which I hope never happens but stuff does happen) as faster and larger capacity SSDs become available which cost much less than the CD SSDs. I don't mind doing my homework and finding SSDs that meet the requirements and take the risk.
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Except that you're wrong.

Convergent Design has tested and continues to test many makes and models of SSD. The simple fact is that it is ridiculously rare to find product that performs so and reliably as the SSDs we currently use. The specs may claim they do but in real world testing by us it is simply not the case. We don't suffer drive failure. We don't suffer data rate drops. We don't suffer corruption issues. We will always search for alternatives, but so far these drives are remarkable and singularly unique.

Convergent Design has been through this before. The nanoFlash used standard CF cards, but required high performance ones for various record modes. We published charts, written data, did videos, recommended certain models, etc. It doesn't matter -- people don't pay attention. They buy something cheap and then call us when it doesn't work. It's an enromous headache for us.

So no, you will not see the Odyssey7Q recording to anything but CD-tested, CD-certified media. It is for our mutual benefit.
 
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