Red's Overpriced "Mini Mag" Cards - The Real Story

between me and Brandon I think it's fair to say we've received literally hundreds of requests to weigh in on the controversy surrounding red digital cinema and the expensive proprietary red mini mag media format that they sell for use in their cameras now it recently came to light through Ginnie Meg a maker of third-party non-certified Meg's that contrary to what red has been telling us over the years the red mini mag is in fact not a special product that was developed after countless hours of R&D but rather a simple consumer SSD with an interface adapter in a fancy enclosure now I had assumed that people would lose interest in this story and I decided to just leave it alone but it's escalated to the point where Genie Tech's original video has gone viral to the point where red CEO Jarrod land has had to issue statements to the media defending Reds position and its products so then it's time to break our silence and break this down for y'all starting of course with a breakdown of our own 960 gig mini mag time for some surgery brought to you by the corsair hydro x Corsairs new hydraulic series of custom cooling components includes water blocks reservoirs fittings adapters and more check them out at the link below [Music] to kick things off we're gonna need a torx number six bit to remove the four screws on the bottom of our red mini mag step to pry open the aluminum enclosure step 4 remove the interface adapter which as you guys can see is just a simple pin to pin connection and adaptor it's there's no logic built into it whatsoever and step four five I don't know whatever step run inspect the SSD which is there's your controller there's your D Ram cache and there's one two three four five six seven eight NAND flash module so this is a high-capacity red Meg the store fly 300 C II whatever the hell that is so no in fact it is not special hardware but this isn't a surprise to me and it shouldn't be a surprise to you now shockingly I actually can't find any tear downs of red mini mags online that weren't done in the last few days since this story broke but I've known about this for years and I've even complained publicly that red is selling regular old M SATA SSDs add obscene markups they're not even PCI Express M SATA SSDs in a fancy red enclosure oh and you don't even get red it's like it's a black enclosure if you don't buy the 480 or the 960 gig it just took until now to blow up why well it seems to come from this video from Ginni tech a small-time maker of knockoff mags and that's actually the biggest reason that I had intended to ignore this whole thing I have no desire to draw attention to them especially because given what I know about social media marketing it wouldn't surprise me if some of the outrage over this is actually BOTS created by Ginny tech themselves but whether that's the case or not here we are so let's take a quick look at both the valid points and the misleading arguments that they make in their video that they position as an expose but that is ultimately designed to put pressure on red and then ultimately sell you their product so right out of the gate they present forum posts from red users about failed mags as evidence that Jared lands reliability justification for the cost of a red meg is bullspit now the problem with that is that without knowing the sample size a dozen or even a hundred failures is not necessarily an indication that there is a significant problem with product quality or validation the second problem is the way that Ginni tech repeatedly attacks red for their made-in-the-usa claims now red didn't meet the requirements and that's pretty scummy but to their credit at least they backed down removing the message from their site and their products so given that it is hypocritical at best for Ginni to hammer away at this point when their site still seems to suggest that their products originated in the UK and as red actually alluded to in a court filing Jenny Meg even used to make similar claims about their products being made in the UK when their components are obviously sourced from other countries in a similar manner now as for the 480 and 960 versus 512 gig and 1 terabyte advertised capacity scandal red really should have communicated this better but they also haven't said anything outright false here the raw capacity of any 480 gigabyte SSD is 512 gigabytes that's just the way that NAND flash manufacturing works and it's up to the integrator in this case virgin to determine how much of that 512 gigs or 1 terabyte as it were to allocate to spare area spare area improves both performance and longevity now red never should have advertised them as 512 gigs if all 512 gigs weren't accessible but they weren't technically wrong because physically there is 512 gigs of Flash on the drive now as for the claim about the quality of the non commodity media that red uses so mine is a virgin store fly with some Toshiba nan chips on it it's fine and from an industrial brand but neither the NAND flash nor the controller is anything super special of course a big part of read story is the firmware so then is that special this is where things get a bit nuanced Jeni Tech is 100% correct in asserting that the commodity SSDs that Red's using contain standard firmware but he doesn't say that they don't also contain extra bits one thing he doesn't show in his video is that while the camera does recognize any random and SATA SSD in a mega enclosure popped into the side of it it actually will not write to it at full speed unless the user takes extra steps to fool the camera into thinking that it is in fact a genuine mag so the main problem that we run into here is Gini tax use of real information that Reds hardware and firmware are not in fact special to draw a misleading conclusion no evidence is actually given to demonstrate that these low-cost consumer grade SSDs cripple the camera's functionality and the faking of customized firmware is really no different from the way that an Nvidia board partner fakes the model number of their reference board to include their vendor information because here's the thing once the product ships in a gigabyte or an EVGA box and is covered by that vendors warranty rather than the warranty of whatever factory built the launch boards for Nvidia it is in fact a gigabyte or an EVGA or an asus product even if the different model number basically amounted to altering a couple of strings in the firmware so that it's detected by the software correctly a red Meg becomes a red product not a Verdean or micron product as soon as red ships it to you with their support attached to it no foul play at least that would be the case if red hadn't been so disingenuous about the way that they've marketed these things over the years now I've been fairly focused on the way that Gini Tech has misled the cinema community and massage their message up till this point but read is far from blameless here let's change gears now as a techie I'm not too offended by some of Redd's claims for example that a physical adapter couldn't have been created between the original read meg and the current mini Meg it could have been done quite easily given that both of them are just mmm SATA SSDs in EPS fancy machined box but the thing is adapters do add more points of failure and I wouldn't necessarily want to support that either so whatever the one thing that really annoys me is Reds claim that they spend millions of dollars on R&D around their media recording now if red is talking about red Co draw their proprietary compressed raw file format sure I'll buy that kind of awesome but Gini tech makes a very fair point in their video pointing out that the customer already paid for red raw when they bought the camera the red mini mag uses nothing but a standard SATA interface and red would be crazy to use anything other than SATA because SATA which has had millions of dollars spent on its development just not buy red is so well supported across multiple platforms including the cameras that record to them and the PCs and Macs that need to read from them during footage ingest the other really offensive thing that Jarrod hasn't been entirely forthright about is exactly what aspect of Reds firmware development has been infringed by Ginny Tech in spite of all the evidence to the contrary he still seems to be at least suggesting that it is some kind of proprietary SSD firmware algorithm but it seems far more likely to me that it's simply a DRM scheme now to be clear from a legal standpoint that makes him right his product has been infringed just not in a way that makes me feel bad for him at all calling the way that the meg is written to redzone is misleading at best let's break down how it works this is a really nice video from Jersey filmmaker covering the unusual way that red writes video files to a Meg basically every time you press the record button you create a folder instead of a single large clip and that folder is gonna be full of as many four gig files as it takes to record the footage until you press stop your editing software then automatically stitches these many clips together now if you've been around the block as many times as I have you'll know that this is nothing but a simple workaround for the four gig file size limit of the fat32 file system fat32 is desirable for its simplicity it's high throughput and of course it's cross-platform compatibility but it's the furthest possible thing from Red's own and Red's own way of doing things has other archaic workarounds to instead of allowing an individual clip to be deleted from the mag after a bad take for example red requires that the entire mag be formatted before use now their claim is that this is to protect the user from accidental deletions but as far as I can tell it's just to compensate for their basic ass SSDs here's a thing a full format with secure erase reduces the write speed penalty that comes with overwriting previously used flash cells so it's pretty much a cost-saving measure which is kind of sad when you consider how widely available better SSDs that would not require this limitation are these days so yeah repackaging commodity products and marking them up ten times upsets me but ultimately as a customer nobody is forcing me to buy this it's not like I don't know the price ahead of time so I don't have a ton of ground to stand on no the thing that as always really pissed me off is their nonsense about how much they manage to spend on R&D without coming to the same basic conclusion that the entire storage industry came two decades ago nothing is perfect not your consumer thing not your server great thing nothing is perfect and for anything to be truly professional-grade it must have redundancy now red admits outright that they spend a lot of time performing data recovery services on their customers media so to me then that would indicate that they are well aware that their media does in fact fail I do applaud their efforts to help their customers recover their data not everybody does this but the issue for me is that data recovery is an ass-backwards solution and when I read a statement like that from a company CEO I can't help but think that red has weighed the cost of data recovery against the cost of actually engineering a more robust solution and decided you know what it's just not worth it to create something better they've determined that putting your footage at risk is worth it compared to the cost of engineering a raid one mag solution that would only increase their cost per Meg by about double which we can see that they could easily absorb while almost never requiring data recovery which guys even if you do get the footage back causes stress and lost productivity that their customers will never get back anyway nothing here was a revelation to me and I find both Gini Tech's motivation here and the way that this has suddenly blown up highly questionable but rayet has never put me in a position to feel bad for them so from my perspective guys you are reaping what you've sown these are the dangers of magic black box marketing once the illusion fails people feel justifiably betrayed and pissed off so I would recommend being honest in the first place next time usually the engineering is cooler than the magic story anyway and if it's not engineer it better next time like with real-time redundancy for my footage Thanks and thanks to our sponsor if you use Wi-Fi a lot on your smart phone then why pay for a fixed data monthly plan stop paying for what you don't use with ting with ting you can use their savings calculator at Linus ENCOM we're gonna have that link below to see exactly how much you can save ting has nationwide LTE coverage using both t-mobile and Sprint networks and they'll never block throttle or interfere with your online access in any way they've got no contract so you can try take out for a month with no strings attached and if you switch to 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Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 1,634,587

Rating: 4.9275479 out of 5

Keywords: red, camera, storage, memory, proprietary, jinni, mag, 8k, resolution, film, production, digital, raw, ssd

Id: nqJXu4K1igg

Length: 15min 44sec (944 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 17 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/AntilagOn]

That's some hilariously poor write endurance for a drive that's meant to be recording 8K at 164MB/s. 72TB of total writes on the Micron SSD. Someone could probably kill that thing in a few months.

[u/CubedSeventyTwo]

Jesus christ I expected the mags to be marked up a bit, was thinking maybe $800 for the 960gb, but $2.4K!?!?! For an off the shelf sata ssd in this day and age?!? Holy fuck. That's probably a $50 part in bulk, with a $2 adapter and $4 aluminum shell, and a split second to write a line of DRM code to it. Fuuuuck that.

[u/andrewia]

TL;DW Linus says that both the third party SSD manufacturer and RED have been disingenuous. But RED deserves some hate for selling consumer SSDs at crazy markups with free "recovery services" instead of spending relatively little to add storage redundancy.

[u/randomstranger454]

I wonder if formating the SSD instead of deleting individual files is cause the camera OS can't trim the drive. Formating the drive would bring it in a clean state.

[u/zyck_titan]

RED deserves the hate they are getting from this video and this thread. But I think it's interesting for those that that don't know why they are getting this hate.

The argument I'm seeing is that they are making professional gear and so are demanding professional gear prices.

After all, you're spending $30K on a mid-range Gemini 5K to get up and running (that's even assuming you have some support gear already). That sure sounds like professional gear money.

The thing is, RED is the budget option.

ARRI and Sony are making the really high end camera gear, and they charge prices almost double the Gemini 5Ks asking price for a mere 4K camera.

"But RED has higher resolution, ARRI doesn't make an 8K camera" you might say. And you're right, the paper specs do seem to point to an advantage for the RED cameras.

But there is far more to a camera than how many pixels it spits out. Go look back at prosumer DSLR cameras from the megapixel wars. You'd have cameras with crazy megapixel counts, but they produced very noisy and/or washed out images. Meanwhile much more expensive professional cameras from the same era which produced much cleaner images.

 

Anyway, this is a long rambling way to say that RED is the prosumer camera, not the true professional one. But not because they are trying to be the prosumer option. To make up for their sensor costs they are cutting corners, and the mini-mag controversy is showing this.

That being said, it's still a great camera; if you can deal with the price and you have a use where it fits (like linus tech tips, they are sort of ideally set up for using these).

[u/acyclovir31]

10,000$ camera needs a 2500$ ssd card lol. The math adds up.

[u/3DXYZ]

Red is legendary for their bullshit marketing and ridiculous prices. They make great hardware/software but they know their customers are making many millions of dollars with their product so they want a piece of that pie. They've always been full of shit but the quality is still there... you just have to pay far more than what the hardware is actually worth. Red's $2,500 for a 960GB SSD that actually costs $120 is insane. Red thinks very little of their customers.

[u/rushmc1]

I won't lie, I read that headline first as "Little Sebastian."

[u/Yojimbo4133]

They do this because you'll buy it