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

[JonoT]

 

Red Digital Cinema has come under fire recently over allegations that their Mini-Mag storage cards are just cheap commodity SSDs in a fancy enclosure. As it turns out, there's some truth to these assertions, but the situation is not quite as simple as it's made out to be. Let's unwrap it.

 

Buy Cameras:
On Amazon: https://lmg.gg/amazondigitalcamera
On Newegg: https://lmg.gg/neweggdigitalcamera
 

[Velcade]

oh boy

[Dedayog]

I was totally digging this video until they showed the BUY screen for Red Mini Mag in 960GB for $2,350.00.

 

Please tell me that's not USD.

[Skiiwee29]

21 minutes ago, jstudrawa said:

I was totally digging this video until they showed the BUY screen for Red Mini Mag in 960GB for $2,350.00.

 

Please tell me that's not USD.

yes it is. 

[Dedayog]

2 minutes ago, Skiiwee29 said:

yes it is. 

That's okay, $10k Ethernet cables and $1000 speaker wire needs a third musketeer

 

F*cking suckers!

[Red :)]

I want to see a better mag made using that scheme.

 

An upcoming video perhaps?

[Nystemy]

If it is just an mSATA SSD, then couldn't one just use a SATA raid controller or something?

Like one of these:

 

 Probably an mSATA to SATA extension cable might be needed, but that should be fairly trivial.

Then it is just the firmware side.

 

Though, I fully agree that RED should just have a redundant option to begin with, instead of using cheap drives and bundling data recovery into their 2350$ price tag...

(Since surely, a fair portion of those 2 grand must be the data recovery, something that truly shouldn't be needed to start with.)

[Dedayog]

Just now, Nystemy said:

If it is just an mSATA SSD, then couldn't one just use a SATA raid controller or something?

Like one of these:

 

 Probably an mSATA to SATA extension cable might be needed, but that should be fairly trivial.

Then it is just the firmware side.

 

Though, I fully agree that RED should just have a redundant option to begin with, instead of using cheap drives and bundling data recovery into their 2350$ price tag...

(Since surely, a fair portion of those 2 grand must be the data recovery, something that truly shouldn't be needed to start with.)

"instead of using cheap drives and bundling data recovery into their 2350$ price tag..."

 

Bah, it worked well for Ford (Pinto) and then GM (engine turning off while driving).

 

 

[TechyBen]

Do even better. How about a network cable adapter to NAS? Record straight to Petabyte?

 

Hmmm. Searching shows there does not seem to be any interface to fake a SATA connection over NAS/RJ45.

[Thaldor]

Paint me surprised, or not. Been following camera stuff (mostly photo but also video) long enough to know that there is always the one company that goes "Oh! Ours is better, trust us. It just is better. NO! WE ARE NOT TELLING YOU WHAT IT IS! IT'S BETTER AND THAT BETTER BE ENOUGH FOR YOU! BUY!" and in the end the basic functionality and hardware are 100% the same as the competitors, just in a different package (krhm krhm.. Sony). And it's not even contained in there, it's everywhere. Apple says their SSDs aren't SSDs but something different, turns out they are quite normal SSDs with different connector that can be easily just pin-adapted to M.2 (except with the newest models with that security chip, because Apple removed the SSD controller from the SSDs to the security chip, because well probably everyone who doesn't care about warranties and wanted to add more memory has bought small adapter and stuck bigger SSD to their mac, also it doesn't take long to google few softwares and do data recovery on mac SSD even on Windows for the reason that Apple Repair doesn't give a shit about it). And quite frankly same shit is just everywhere where someone advertises that their product has some magic inside them that makes them better than the competitor and there isn't a single technical stat included why that thing is anyway better than the competitors.

[samcool55]

40 minutes ago, Nystemy said:

If it is just an mSATA SSD, then couldn't one just use a SATA raid controller or something?

Like one of these:

 

 Probably an mSATA to SATA extension cable might be needed, but that should be fairly trivial.

Then it is just the firmware side.

 

Though, I fully agree that RED should just have a redundant option to begin with, instead of using cheap drives and bundling data recovery into their 2350$ price tag...

(Since surely, a fair portion of those 2 grand must be the data recovery, something that truly shouldn't be needed to start with.)

Yup, msata to sata is really easy to find, and really not that expensive.

https://www.startech.com/HDD/Adapters/SATA-to-mSATA-Adapter~MSAT2SAT3

 

You can probably find them on aliexpress as well for a few bucks. Throw in a sata data cable and the data part works!

 

Only thing is that you need external power, can either be done by an external power brick that converts wall power to sata or molex power (molex can easily be adapted to sata) or you can grab one of those USB to sata for 2.5" drives and extend the sata power only so you can connect it to the adapter you posted.

 

It's not really difficult, a bit ghetto, can be done for quite cheap, we just need an alex or an anthony and yaaay another great video.

[Nystemy]

2 minutes ago, samcool55 said:

Yup, msata to sata is really easy to find, and really not that expensive.

https://www.startech.com/HDD/Adapters/SATA-to-mSATA-Adapter~MSAT2SAT3

 

You can probably find them on aliexpress as well for a few bucks. Throw in a sata data cable and the data part works!

 

Only thing is that you need external power, can either be done by an external power brick that converts wall power to sata or molex power (molex can easily be adapted to sata) or you can grab one of those USB to sata for 2.5" drives and extend the sata power only so you can connect it to the adapter you posted.

 

It's not really difficult, a bit ghetto, can be done for quite cheap, we just need an alex or an anthony and yaaay another great video.

Yup, a simple short hacky video containing cheap stuff to make an expensive thing better. Fairly typical LTT content to be fair.
And yes, such a video would be interesting to see.

[Mahoney]

No mention of 480gb ssd's being labeled as 512gb? Thats 30gb less you're getting

[Razerian]

1 hour ago, Mahoney said:

No mention of 480gb ssd's being labeled as 512gb? Thats 30gb less you're getting

I believe that was covered at 4m 50s where he explains that there technically is 512gb, though only 480gb is available for the user. It's just a cheap way to bend the truth to make it seem bigger, like when you buy a 10TB drive and you can only see 9.3TB when you install it.

[Nystemy]

2 minutes ago, Razerian said:

I believe that was covered at 4m 50s where he explains that there technically is 512gb, though only 480gb is available for the user. It's just a cheap way to bend the truth to make it seem bigger, like when you buy a 10TB drive and you can only see 9.3TB when you install it.

Though, the thing with 10 TB drives only showing up as 9.094 TB is actually due to hard drive manufacturers counting based on 1000, and some OSes like Windows count base on 1024.

1KB is 1 000 or 1024 bytes (2.34% in the difference)
1MB is 1 000 000 or 1 048 576 bytes (4.63% in the difference)
1GB is 1 000 000 000 or 1073741824 bytes (6.86% in the difference)
etc....

At one Yotta byte, the difference would be 17.28%, so a rather sizable difference.

Though, there is a standard where one adds an "i" after the prefix to define that it is indeed counting with 1024 instead of 1000 increments.

So if a 10 TiB drive only shows up as 9.094 TB in Windows, then you have been scammed.

[Luscious]

This is no different than the shady tactics ebike manufacturers like Luna cycle and Rad use when they put proprietary connectors on their batteries so that you can only use THEIR BATTERY and force you to buy replacements from them at jacked up prices.

 

Sure, they will feed you all kinds of snake oil about their supposedly over engineered and "tested" battery. Except they conveniently forget to mention the cheap commodity BMS they got a full container load of from their supplier Sum Ting Wong. Yeah, that's the one with the grain of rice resistors that you know will burn out before 100 charge cycles and render that proprietary pack useless THE VERY DAY AFTER it's warranty expires, even if the 18650's inside are still salvageable.

 

I have the knowledge to build my own battery, and a vastly superior one at that. But dealing with proprietary connectors means I have no hope of making repairs in the field or using off the shelf replacements when something that is unusual does break prematurely. Now I am forced to hack that connector and void the bike warranty to get it back up and running, or possibly be left stranded without a bike.

 

So to every manufacturer out there who tries to sell me a product that they don't want me to be able to repair easily yet fails prematurely and only has overpriced replacement parts, I graciously extend to you my middle finger:

 

[AnonymousGuy]

I'm amused that Red could have done a little bit of effort and not looked like pieces of shit.  Build in raid 1 or extra redundancy on the flash or write a custom firmware that does literally anything on top.

 

But no, slap their logo on it and upcharge by a factor of 10.  

[Spotty]

Really good video! I'm glad you didn't just take it at face value and that you actually looked in to the motivations behind the people making the claims. I never watched the original videos so I wasn't aware of the way they presenting it or that it was from a company that made 'knock off' drives. I assumed it was just a teardown style youtube channel that took things apart and whatnot (like Jerryrigeverything).

 

Like Linus I'm a little bemused. What did people expect were in the mag minis? Some sort of super insane overly engineered futuristic SSD? No, of course it is just a regular old SSD. Sure it's expensive as all hell, but if you stick an Apple logo on a monitor stand you can put a $999 price tag on it. All about that branding yo.

No-one buying RED camera equipment thinks it's going to be cheap. I would like to think that anyone who spends $50k+ on camera gear is going to do their research to know what they're buying, or at the very least to know what the accessories required to operate it are going to cost prior to purchasing.

 

I saw Anthony's tweets earlier and he's right. RED products and RED accessories are their own ecosystem. "A monopoly inside a bubble" I think he called it. The cost of the SSDs is just part of the cost of buying in to the RED ecosystem. It sucks, and it's stupid how much they cost, but there's no competition so what do you do? Not buy storage for your $15k-$55k camera? That's not really an option.

 

Now, this company selling 'knock off' RED SSDs may be a little bit, err, dramatic in its video and marketing campaign... But they're right. The RED SSDs aren't anything special. They've obviously seen that there is profit in making SSDs compatible with the RED hardware and competing directly with RED. They can come in, produce something for the RED ecosystem at a low cost (since it's basically cheap off the shelf components with a pin-to-pin adapter and a sprinkling of special firmware). Because the RED products are so overpriced they can sell it at a much lower cost while still making a tidy profit. RED left the door open to this by having such huge mark ups on their product. They only have themselves to blame.

It's competition. It's good. Hopefully it causes RED to either design their SSDs better (perhaps like Linus suggested with redundancy) or sell their product at a more reasonable price.

 

One problem they might face is if RED has some patent on the unique(?) mSATA adapter they use or something along those lines which they could use to shut down the competition. If RED can argue that this 'knock off' is infringing on their patented designs. If not, then fair game for any companies who want to come in and make their own RED compatible storage devices and sell them.

 

1 hour ago, Razerian said:

like when you buy a 10TB drive and you can only see 9.3TB when you install it.

It's a little different to that, as @Nystemy explained above.
The "512GB" model which only has 480GB available would show up as 447GiB usable in your operating system.

 

It is correct that there is 512GB of memory on the drive in raw NAND Flash capacity. As Linus explained some of it is locked away. This is standard practice for SSDs and allows for garbage collection. They have a TechQuickie video on it here:

 

The problem with the way RED is marketing the drives is that all other SSDs are marketed as what is available after over-provisioning and do not show the raw amount of NAND flash capacity. Consumers expect that advertising a drive as 512GB capacity means 512GB capacity after over-provisioning has been accounted for - Not 512GB raw NAND Flash capacity.

 

However, I can't actually find where RED advertises the 480GB drive as a 512GB drive as claimed in the video? They claim "What is mis-sold as RED Mini-Mag 512GB in truth is only 480GB"...

I went on to RED's website and it shows storage available as 480GB and 960GB. Initially I thought "Oh wow, RED have updated their product page after the controversy"... But then I jumped on to the Waybackmachine to look when the change took place, and looked at their website going back to a year ago and it has always been advertised and sold as 480GB and 960GB. I can't find any mention of "512GB" capacity advertised by RED? Am I missing something here? Is there a different "512GB" product that I'm not seeing?
 

Spoiler

 

Edit: Found it. RED advertised it as 512GB and 1TB back in 2016. Either at the end of 2016 or start of 2017 it was changed to 480GB and 960GB.
https://web.archive.org/web/20161122054229/http://www.red.com:80/store/products/red-mini-mag

So I would imagine there would be lots of people out there with older "512GB" drives, probably including LMG, however it seems RED has realised the issue and corrected it several years ago.

Edited July 18, 2019 by Spotty

[kingmeowser]

I found it interesting that they use FAT32 instead of exFAT to format the SSD. Having all those 4GB files and needing to run a format when you want to delete stuff seems pretty clunky to me. RED could justify the high price they charge for these if they put two drives in RAID 1 in each mini mag, used exFAT formatting, and provided alerts both on the camera and on the computer when one of the drives fails, letting the user send it in to be replaced. In the super rare case of a double drive failure, they would provide data recovery services. The drives don't even need to be nvme if sata has adequate bandwidth for recording.

[TechHeathen]

4 hours ago, Nystemy said:

Yup, a simple short hacky video containing cheap stuff to make an expensive thing better. Fairly typical LTT content to be fair.
And yes, such a video would be interesting to see.

That sounds exactly what they're probably gonna do lmao Aliexpress to the rescue! Or it'll be a total failure. Either way I'd watch those shenanigans lmao (and yes I know how to spell shenanigans without looking it up lmao) 

[Razor512]

Seems like Linus is a little too biased towards RED for this as he applies his hindsight as reason why everyone should think the same way.

 

For example, they market the minimag and talk about it publicly as if it is some highly advanced custom storage solution designed specifically to meet the needs of their cameras with uncompromising reliability which as with all custom low volume technology that must meet high endurance standards, carries a steep price.

 

They use that aura of false information to trick people into accepting a massive markup. Think how a bottle of oil extracted from an animal that is worth next to nothing, can suddenly be worth a lot of money because someone is able to market it in a way that gets people to think it will improve their health and prevent diseases.

 

The minimag is an overpriced scam, there is no other way to put it. Please also understand that a scam doesn't mean that something doesn't work at all, it can also be from misleading the customer for the purpose of getting extra money from them.

 

Think selling someone a lamp and that comes prebuilt, but you as the store still charges the customer an assembly fee.

 

Next, they violate the regulations surrounding terms like Made in the US. Comparing US law to UK law is literally like comparing apples and oranges.

What RED did was literally exactly following the example the US government used to describe what a violation of the regulation would look like.

This all further feeds into the reasoning for them essentially engaging in fraud when it comes to how they represent the product in order to justify a higher price.

 

The first reply from the owner of the company stated that the SSDs have special firmware, then when it was proven that they did not alter the firmware in any way, they then back racked and stated that the firmware is really in the camera in how it writes to the SSD, and it is suppose to write in a way that makes data written in a better way to the NAND (which cannot happen with the standard firmware in the SSD). Furthermore that reasoning is 100% flawed as if the firmware is all in the camera, then the markup in the camera is what covers the firmware cost, the SSD should not have such a markup.

 

Also you claimed they did not demonstrate it recording, just as you proceed to also not demonstrate the issue you claim exists if you use a different SSD. Both claims remain unsupported, and verification would require someone to purchase the same model of SSD and swap it in their minimag and do a test recording.

 

PS, for the over-provisioning/ spare NAND, all SSDs have that, if you truly believed that statement then you would report the 512GB Samsung 970 pro as being misleading since it has more than 512GB of NAND due to the over-provisioning and spare NAND, no SSD is sold based on the RAW NAND, it is sold based on user addressable NAND, they may use different interpretations of the space, e.g., 1000MB per GB instead of 1024MB per GB, but it is based on how many bytes the user can actually use. PS, a 480GB SSD will not have 32GB+ of spare NAND.

 

Raw NAND cannot be used, especially since for most low capacity drives will have NAND dies that would represent a much higher capacity drive but due to defects, only a small amount of the space is usable. For your statement to be valid, then it would also be valid and legal a company like AMD to have taken their dual core Phenom CPUs (AMD Phenom X2) as quad core CPUs since they technically had 4 cores, in many cases you could actually use all 4 cores if you unlocked them in the bios and down-clocked the CPU significantly for cases where some cores were not stable at stock speeds.

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

what's this? no caps lock in an LTT title? i believe i have traveled back in time to 2015!

[Dedayog]

55 minutes ago, Razor512 said:

Seems like Linus is a little too biased towards RED for this as he applies his hindsight as reason why everyone should think the same way.

 

For example, they market the minimag and talk about it publicly as if it is some highly advanced custom storage solution designed specifically to meet the needs of their cameras with uncompromising reliability which as with all custom low volume technology that must meet high endurance standards, carries a steep price.

 

They use that aura of false information to trick people into accepting a massive markup. Think how a bottle of oil extracted from an animal that is worth next to nothing, can suddenly be worth a lot of money because someone is able to market it in a way that gets people to think it will improve their health and prevent diseases.

 

The minimag is an overpriced scam, there is no other way to put it. Please also understand that a scam doesn't mean that something doesn't work at all, it can also be from misleading the customer for the purpose of getting extra money from them.

 

Think selling someone a lamp and that comes prebuilt, but you as the store still charges the customer an assembly fee.

 

Next, they violate the regulations surrounding terms like Made in the US. Comparing US law to UK law is literally like comparing apples and oranges.

What RED did was literally exactly following the example the US government used to describe what a violation of the regulation would look like.

This all further feeds into the reasoning for them essentially engaging in fraud when it comes to how they represent the product in order to justify a higher price.

 

The first reply from the owner of the company stated that the SSDs have special firmware, then when it was proven that they did not alter the firmware in any way, they then back racked and stated that the firmware is really in the camera in how it writes to the SSD, and it is suppose to write in a way that makes data written in a better way to the NAND (which cannot happen with the standard firmware in the SSD). Furthermore that reasoning is 100% flawed as if the firmware is all in the camera, then the markup in the camera is what covers the firmware cost, the SSD should not have such a markup.

 

Also you claimed they did not demonstrate it recording, just as you proceed to also not demonstrate the issue you claim exists if you use a different SSD. Both claims remain unsupported, and verification would require someone to purchase the same model of SSD and swap it in their minimag and do a test recording.

 

PS, for the over-provisioning/ spare NAND, all SSDs have that, if you truly believed that statement then you would report the 512GB Samsung 970 pro as being misleading since it has more than 512GB of NAND due to the over-provisioning and spare NAND, no SSD is sold based on the RAW NAND, it is sold based on user addressable NAND, they may use different interpretations of the space, e.g., 1000MB per GB instead of 1024MB per GB, but it is based on how many bytes the user can actually use. PS, a 480GB SSD will not have 32GB+ of spare NAND.

 

Raw NAND cannot be used, especially since for most low capacity drives will have NAND dies that would represent a much higher capacity drive but due to defects, only a small amount of the space is usable. For your statement to be valid, then it would also be valid and legal a company like AMD to have taken their dual core Phenom CPUs (AMD Phenom X2) as quad core CPUs since they technically had 4 cores, in many cases you could actually use all 4 cores if you unlocked them in the bios and down-clocked the CPU significantly for cases where some cores were not stable at stock speeds.

So all that and it boils down to RED is an overpriced piece of shit, and Linus is knowingly okay with it?

 

Almost as if there was another company that paved the way for this type of behavior...

 

Orange?  Pear?  Mango?

 

It's on the tip of my tongue, give me a second...

[Spotty]

57 minutes ago, Razor512 said:

PS, for the over-provisioning/ spare NAND, all SSDs have that, if you truly believed that statement then you would report the 512GB Samsung 970 pro as being misleading since it has more than 512GB of NAND due to the over-provisioning and spare NAND, no SSD is sold based on the RAW NAND, it is sold based on user addressable NAND, they may use different interpretations of the space, e.g., 1000MB per GB instead of 1024MB per GB, but it is based on how many bytes the user can actually use.

Except up until around 2017 the SSD sold by RED was sold and advertised based on the capacity of raw NAND flash memory. The "512GB" Red Mag Mini contained 512GB of raw NAND Flash, with only 480GB (447GiB) being accessible to the other after overprovisioning. As I mentioned in my earlier post it appears RED corrected this sometime around end of 2016 or early 2017, with the website updated to show the correct volume of 480GB/960GB.

 

57 minutes ago, Razor512 said:

they may use different interpretations of the space, e.g., 1000MB per GB instead of 1024MB per GB, but it is based on how many bytes the user can actually use. 

The difference between Gigabyte and Gibibytes isn't what was causing the discrepancy between the advertised volume and accessible volume in regards to the RED storage drive.

A 512 Gigabyte drive when formatted would be measured as 476 Gibibytes.
The storage RED which was selling as "512 Gigabytes" was actually 480 Gigabytes (after overprovisioning), which when formatted would be measured as 447 Gibibytes.

 

 

Quote

The minimag is an overpriced scam, there is no other way to put it. Please also understand that a scam doesn't mean that something doesn't work at all, it can also be from misleading the customer for the purpose of getting extra money from them. 

Additionally, to reply to your comments regarding RED being a scam for selling their storage devices at the price they do...

You can put whatever price tag you want on a product and it's up to the consumer whether or not they want to buy it. Do you think perfume costs $150 a bottle to make? Hell no. People still buy it though.

 

In my opinion they were misleading about the capacity they advertised on their storage devices, however looking at the waybackmachine it appears they changed the stated capacity back in 2016-2017 and fixed it, so I'm not going to get too hung up on something that was corrected years ago.

Edited July 18, 2019 by Spotty

[Razor512]

When I mentioned the 1000 vs 1024, I was not trying to explain what RED was doing, instead I was pointing out an area of the market where formatted capacity can be different and it is still accurate.

 

In the case of RED, in the original video, the previous drives that contained true 512GB drives, actually had more space, The staff there stated a 5% difference.

a 480GB SSD that may contain 512GB of raw NAND does not mean that all 512GB works. One thing that is very common with NAND production is an attempt to sell every functional package on the wafer, and that often comes in the form of dies where some NAND cells are defective to be sold as a lower capacity. Furthermore in the case of budget SSDs like the kind shown in those videos, are unlikely to do something like use 32GB overprovisioning, even enterprise SSDs don't go that far at that capacity level. Anyway for the storage comments it just reminded me of the UK parliament session where loot boxes suddenly became "surprise mechanics"

 

 

Edit: for the scam comment, it is based on if a higher price is justified due to misleading information. For example, many people in the US are willing to pay more for something made in the USA, if you lie about where a product is made, then you can likely save on cheap labor from China, while getting the profit bump from people willing to accept a higher price of an item made in the US.

 

Same if you try to market a 480GB drive as 512GB.