SATA Harddrives + USB2 External Enclosure

Homersapien

Homersapien

Well-known member
I've been looking into using SATA Harddrives with External Enclosures using USB 2.0 to power and write to the harddrive as a means to record from RedOne. A 3.5" 500gb Harddrive and the Enclosure can be got for approximately £120 (About $200 I'd Imagine although this is the cheaper end of the scale, better models can obviously be got for more, although they are often much of a muchness). It would weigh about 0.7kg and would be writeable to at a speed of 300Mbps (37.5MB/s) enough for 4k RedCode Raw at 30fps. At that cost I would simply hand over the entire Harddrive and Enclosure to the client and they can edit directly from it using the USB 2.0 connection at 380Mbps (47.5MB/s). The £120 would simply be priced into the production. It seems to me to offer a very affordable option that actually helps the workflow as well. I'm sure there must also be a way to install two of them and record to both directly in order to have a backup version available and it would only increase the weight on the red rails by about 1.5kg when you feature in a means of attaching them.

Am I missing something in my logic here because it seems like an easy way of working with the data and with clients compared to a RedDrive that you then offload the information onto another Harddrive for the client to take away. Unless you buy a Red Drive for every shoot and hand that over to them, and given overseas users might have to wait some time to receive a new Drive this wouldn't be convenient if you ran out on a shoot - It'd then be very costly to have spares lying around "just in case". Also the RedDrive only holds 160GB of data compared to the 500GB on the SATA/USB2 setup I mention here. If RedCode Raw records at 27MB/s then this setup would give you 5 hours of Recording time compared to 1 hours and 40 minutes of with the RedDrive.

What problems are represented here? Do SATA drives not like to be moved around? Are there connection or writing problems between Red and such a setup?
 
As I understand it, the RED-DRIVE is 'just' a compact (2.5" not 3.5") version of what you are talking about, with the addition of FireWire 800/400 and eSATA. It is of course designed for the purpose of mounting on the camera, which yours wouldn't be. IF there is no Red specific hardware in the RED-DRIVE, and the Red One just sees it as a drive, I suppose there would be no reason you could not connect any alternative drive with the correct interface to the Red One, as long as it was formatted appropriately.

One possible issue with your system. I'm not sure if USB-2 has enough power to run a 3.5" drive. But since the Red will have a power output for external devices, you might be able to power it from that.

Nick
 
Also to consider would be power consumption. A typical 3.5" HD would use up to about 30W during spinup & 10-15W during seek vs. a 2.5" that uses about 2.5W.
 
A couple of things I see with that setup:

1.The drive probably needs to be ruggedised to be a failproof system with the rigours of production.

2. Smaller drives will be more reliable in terms of the rate of spin. The disc gets written closer and closer to the centre of the disc as it fills up and with larger drives will be more susceptible to skips and dropped frames. Btter to swap out smaller drives than use one huge one.

I could be wrong (no techie by any stretch) but I only use standard drives for offload/copies - I use a USB OTG Cutie for offloading my P2 cards on the HVX.

Jeff
 
Given the mooted price (less than $1000 seems to imply somewhere near $1000) I'd expect there to be more to the Red-Drive than the alternative you've mentioned there.

Plus I wouldn't rely on USB2 to sustain that transfer speed, nor the drive itself.
 
Elo Homersapien,

SATA dirves are exactly the same as any Hard disk drive, it is only the interface, which changes (ATA; SCSI; SATA). All HDD doesn't like when you shake them too much... but I do not kwno exactly what is too much. We should try to know!

As nothing has been said about recording images without RED-DRIVE or REDFLASH, I am not sure you would be able to record to your HDD.

Anyway do not forget that interface transfer is not the real speed of the HDD. Also do not forget FireWire800 exists, which would be even better, as SATA2 interface speed is 300MBytes/sec opposed to FireWire400 and USB2 which are aournd 40MBytes/sec each. But if you could have a external SATA port that would be the best.

ciao,
antoine.
 
The 500GB drive I am looking at is Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000KS and has the following power consumption:

 Read/Write: 9.50 Watts
Idle: 8.75 Watts
Standby: 1.60 Watts
Sleep: 1.50 Watts

Not as much as 30w, but of course still nearly 4 times more than the 2.5" drives. However the performance advantages are far greater than it's 2.5" counterparts.

Concerning the USB2 Powered issue, something like this one (albeit an IDE one) is what I mean, it says it's USB Powered. If it's lying then it isn't my fault :)
Link

The Shock tolerance of the Harddrive is 65 g @ 2ms (operating), now I don't have a clue how much that is but another aspect might be that the operator uses an enclosure that takes out alot of the shock. The harddrive can then be swapped to an cheap external enclosure to be handed to the client. That said I'd imagine it could handle general movement pretty well, if you want to drop your RedOne from the side of the building then a harddrive would be the least of my worries. Also I'd imagine this would have far greater Shock Tolerance than a film roll stuck on the back of your camera.
 
Stephen W said:
Given the mooted price (less than $1000 seems to imply somewhere near $1000) I'd expect there to be more to the Red-Drive than the alternative you've mentioned there.

Plus I wouldn't rely on USB2 to sustain that transfer speed, nor the drive itself.
Click to expand...
Why would Red be including USB2 on the camera if it wasn't able to sustain it's output. USB2 is 480Mbps... plenty fast enough imho, if I'm wrong then fair dues but it seems a little odd.

The only thing the drive needs to be able to do is talk to the camera and tell it how much space is left and that it's getting used up. Other than that what else could the Red-Drive offer I wonder? I did notice in one pic it looked like an ipod so perhaps it has an interface on it that tells you certian details about it.
 
Homersapien said:
Read/Write: 9.50 Watts <snip> Not as much as 30w
Click to expand...

Aye, that's pretty decent. The 30W I mentioned was for spinup though, something to consider when running off a battery/inverter. Spinup for that WD drive would probably be just below 20W.
 
we're gonna need a faster drive

we're gonna need a faster drive

Homersapien said:
The 500GB drive I am looking at is Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000KS and has the following power consumption:

 Read/Write: 9.50 Watts
Idle: 8.75 Watts
Standby: 1.60 Watts
Sleep: 1.50 Watts

Not as much as 30w, but of course still nearly 4 times more than the 2.5" drives. However the performance advantages are far greater than it's 2.5" counterparts.

Concerning the USB2 Powered issue, something like this one (albeit an IDE one) is what I mean, it says it's USB Powered. If it's lying then it isn't my fault :)
Link
Click to expand...

that enclosure link is definitely lying. 3.5" drives cannot be powered through usb 2.0. but that's not even the issue. the real issue is sustained speed of any drive. there are very few drives (no 2.5") that would sustain the 27.5 mb/s rate required. they all come close but would anyone risk frame drops? i can only assume that red drive consists of two drives (maybe 2.5") in a raid.
 
Homersapien said:
Why would Red be including USB2 on the camera if it wasn't able to sustain it's output. USB2 is 480Mbps... plenty fast enough imho, if I'm wrong then fair dues but it seems a little odd.
Click to expand...

USB2 is there to give you an option for transferring data off the disk, it doesn't have to work in realtime.

I have a Lacie d2 Big Disk Extreme with triple interface (2x3.5" drives in a RAID configuration). I know that even FW800 on this drive under certain conditions doesn't sustain 30MB/s transfer speed - and although USB2 has a theoretical higher speed than FW400, in practice it's not as reliable.

The only thing the drive needs to be able to do is talk to the camera and tell it how much space is left and that it's getting used up. Other than that what else could the Red-Drive offer I wonder? I did notice in one pic it looked like an ipod so perhaps it has an interface on it that tells you certian details about it.
Click to expand...

I'd imagine that:

  • It'll have more than one physical drive which means that...
  • It'll need a hardware RAID controller.
  • It will have to be rugged and shock-proof.
  • It has multiple interfaces
  • May do fun stuff we haven't been told about yet (like having it's own display, or the ability to convert footage on the fly).

There will have to be something fairly special about it to justify a price-tag of somewhere near $1k anyway :)
 
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USB and drives

USB and drives

USB is on the camera body as a general purpose communications port, which therefore could mean access to the drive. But its not intended for streaming data to an external drive for field recording. We have a dedicated port for that.

Power draw, gyroscopic and shock resistance are all major issues when designing a field recording device, and 3.5" drives don't meet the needs. Also, practically speaking you won't want to use any old off-the-shelf highstreet P.C store drive with RED. If it fails, and your project goes south with it...
 
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