Red Mini Mags Exposed

[Zarkex01]

RED Mini Mags are a huge ripoff Jinni.Tech which also sells their own Mags exposed them in their most recent video.

They really just buy CONSUMER mSata SSDs from Micron(aka. Crucial) and convert them from mSata to a so-called Dock Connector. And that's how to increase the price by 10 times.

You can even upgrade them yourself If you really want to. What's even sketchier is that the Mini-Mag has an acclaimed capacity of 512Gb but If you look on the actual SSD it only says 480Gb. (Isn't that fraud?)

What's also kinda shady is that they call it "Made in USA" "Custom Firmware developed by RED" "Special Drives".

1. Made in USA: Not true Micron produces their SSDs in China/Singapore. The casing might be produced in the USA and the Parts assembled in the USA.

2. Custom Firmware developed by RED: jinni.tech bought the same Drive with the official Micron firmware on it and it worked flawlessly. He even reflashed the firmware on the one that was in the Mini Mag

3. Special Drives: Yeah, Micron mSata SSDs aren't really special drives just because you put an adapter on them. They also have the Retail SKU addition "AB" which stands for Standard Feature Set and "YY" which means "Standard Customer Designator"

So Linus, yikes I remember that post where you bought 6 960Gb Mini Mags must hurt to know how much you overpaid for them, but hey as long as they work.

 

[JosephCabbage]

So how would the camera/adaptor react if a larger 1TB or eve 2TB were used with the small parts for a 480GB/240GB or even a 120GB Mini Mag?

Would the entire space be available? Or would it lock it to what the camera reads the drive as? (e.g. 1TB in a "512GB" housing?)

Really interested to see what happens.

[Zarkex01]

On 7/8/2019 at 6:55 PM, JosephCabbage said:

So how would the camera/adaptor react if a larger 1TB or eve 2TB were used with the small parts for a 480GB/240GB or even a 120GB Mini Mag?

Would the entire space be available? Or would it lock it to what the camera reads the drive as? (e.g. 1TB in a "512GB" housing?)

Really interested to see what happens.

It only detects the sizes RED actually sells. So 1TB as long as it's the same drive RED uses would work. And the Housing has no logic in it so you can just buy the same Micron SSD with 1TB that RED Uses and put it in the 512GB Housing.

[dtmcnamara]

LTT team you guys should do a video about this testing out a bunch of other drives as well, even though we know they probably wont work. The RED community is SO butthurt right now and denying so much stuff.

[Zarkex01]

15 hours ago, dtmcnamara said:

LTT team you guys should do a video about this testing out a bunch of other drives as well, even though we know they probably wont work. The RED community is SO butthurt right now and denying so much stuff.

They are denying this bullet-proof evidence?

[TVwazhere]

-Topic Moved To Storage Devices Per user Request-

[Relations]

 

Perhaps Linus can dig into his Mags and gives us his opinion? After all, he too has his share of media/data issues. 

RED has a forum as well, called REDUSER, and the circle of users there seem to share the sentiment of the 'patent holder'.

 

[TheSLSAMG]

The video won't embed because the link format is wrong.

 

 

I'd be interested in Linus taking a look at this. I'd place some more trust in him since I don't believe RED has any affiliation with him and since he also isn't in the market of making a competing product. Seems like some scumbaggery on RED's part if it's indeed true, and what this guy shows is kind of damning.

[G1K777]

Hi everyone, LTT has RED cameras and I wonder if that is legit what the guy is saying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEzLDqELh70
Could LTT make a video about it?

[Mihle]

I did have my suspicions, but I suspected it to be harder to use a non RED one that it is seem to be.

[Relations]

On 7/13/2019 at 7:11 AM, Mihle said:

I did have my suspicions, but I suspected it to be harder to use a non RED one that it is seem to be.

Well Linus did mention that he suspects that it doesn't have any special sauce in his video/vlog (can't remember exactly which video now, it'd been a while), after all storage is storage and he did mention it's not magically fast or anything either. I'm sure he'll be happy to dive into the whole mess once things clear up a bit.

 

He might not do it for a while, while allegations are still being thrown around and a huge-rich company is threatening to sue Jinni.

But I'm sure he'll eventually explore the shenanigans, after all, they do use their products and if he can find a way to improve or explore options for their production use, he'll probably do it.

 

Another article on Cinema5D talking about the issue. The Jarred 'patent' guy wrote a lengthy response to their article basically doubling down on what he has said on the REDUSER forums already. 

 

Cinema5D also has an anonymous RED Mini-Mag owner to back up the claim by Jinni that the drives are 480G.

 

https://www.cinema5d.com/whats-inside-a-red-mini-mag-the-controversy-jarred-lands-statement/

 

Edit : Jarred 'patent' guy is also RED CEO. 

[Mihle]

46 minutes ago, Relations said:

Well Linus did mention that he suspects that it doesn't have any special sauce in his video/vlog (can't remember exactly which video now, it'd been a while), after all storage is storage and he did mention it's not magically fast or anything either. I'm sure he'll be happy to dive into the whole mess once things clear up a bit.

 

He might not do it for a while, while allegations are still being thrown around and a huge-rich company is threatening to sue Jinni.

But I'm sure he'll eventually explore the shenanigans, after all, they do use their products and if he can find a way to improve or explore options for their production use, he'll probably do it.

What I ment, is that I did expect RED to at least put a code in either firmware, or a small ship in the adapter or something to make attempts little bit harder, but no it's just a dumb adapter with standard firmware.

 

I hope Linus explores is too, as he have larger audience.

[Zodiark1593]

   In the response from Red's CEO, it was mentioned that they do perform data recovery without extra charge to the customer, which tends to err on the very expensive side. Whatever apparently minor modifications have been made to the drive/firmware (for example, disabling TRIM, though I can't confirm this myself) probably are done with preservation of data in mind as well.

 

   Though mounting issues seem common, I see very few incidents of data being irretrievably lost. Kind of a big risk to take on when handling footage potentially worth far more than the entire camera rig itself. Undoubtedly, RED will fall quite a lot harder had they lost Marvel's footage than from a comparatively minor controversy as this.

 

   As a result, I'm kind of torn on the pricing. On one hand, even after materials, labor and marketing, there is a monstrous amount margin there so as to be borderline extortion. On the other hand, I also feel the price represents a level of risk that RED is taking on. I've specced and built PCs and Nas servers for family and friends, but I want absolutely nothing to do with handling, potentially the sole copy of, very high value data.

[mariushm]

Yes, Red is saying they have custom algorithms to write to the card to have consistent performance and all that jazz - my guess is they simply tweaked some buffering code so they always write to the card in 512 KB chunks or whatever's a multiple of the internal size of the "pages" in the MLC Flash NAND chips... basically always write a full page, so the SSD doesn't have to read partial data from a page, move it somewhere else, erase page, write data to page, which adds latency and could cause buffering issues.

 

They're selling these RED mags for 1850$ and the SSD inside is 250$ at retail ... you can be sure they bought hundreds if not thousands at way less than that price. 

They could have bought 400-600$ 960 GB  MLC SSDs from a company like Sandisk / WD and work with them to modify firmware to use around 2-300 GB of that in SLC mode for increased endurance, speed, lower write latency, so you could record 5/10/20 minutes directly to SLC and then when the camera is idle a few seconds the camera could send a custom ATA command to flush the write buffer into regular MLC memory.

 

Or, for reliability's sake they could have modified the firmware to hide a few hundred GB and write a log there of everything camera does for recovery purposes... if there's a file system screw-up, recovery software could go from last entry to first and regenerate files based on actual flash pages where data is logged to have been written. It would basically be something like 8-16 bytes of logging for every 512 KB written to the NAND card.

 

 

[thebigsasha]

Was going to post this before I saw the thread already exists. Linus Tech Tips are the perfect channel to do some serious coverage and validation on this issue, maybe disassembling a mag or two and testing the drives Red uses against generic ones, adapting the Red to take standard SATA SSDs and going to 3.84tb.

[Relations]

Part 2 is out. In the video, the CEO confirmed that the 'custom firmware' is not on the drives themselves, but in the camera. This is in the context of replying to a REDUSER forum member asking if they could come up with an adapter to change between Mags and Mini-Mags. 

 

19 hours ago, Zodiark1593 said:

   In the response from Red's CEO, it was mentioned that they do perform data recovery without extra charge to the customer, which tends to err on the very expensive side. Whatever apparently minor modifications have been made to the drive/firmware (for example, disabling TRIM, though I can't confirm this myself) probably are done with preservation of data in mind as well.

 

   Though mounting issues seem common, I see very few incidents of data being irretrievably lost. Kind of a big risk to take on when handling footage potentially worth far more than the entire camera rig itself. Undoubtedly, RED will fall quite a lot harder had they lost Marvel's footage than from a comparatively minor controversy as this.

 

   As a result, I'm kind of torn on the pricing. On one hand, even after materials, labor and marketing, there is a monstrous amount margin there so as to be borderline extortion. On the other hand, I also feel the price represents a level of risk that RED is taking on. I've specced and built PCs and Nas servers for family and friends, but I want absolutely nothing to do with handling, potentially the sole copy of, very high value data.

I agree with what you're saying. Just a bit ticked off by what their CEO is claiming and how they refuse to acknowledge certain claims by Jinni, and doubling down on the whole 'disappointed in the community' part. Also, RED can definitely not provide any of their services, nor would I think that anyone running third-party drives would go to RED for data-recovery services. If RED really wants to offset the cost of providing support and recovery services by charging insane prices for their Mags, would the CEO really be 'disappointed' in his customers for considering alternatives? This is just my 2 cents of course, but if he really believes that the margins they charge are justified, I would think that he would let the market decide over time, after all, if their drives are as robust as they claim, they should expect the customers to realize the difference in quality of their stuff vs 3rd party stuff

 

In the second video, Jinni also showed posts from their COO which said something really dumb. "We were able to preserve nearly the same usable space for you guys on the 480GB" to justify using 480GB drives and mark them as 512GB on the housing. Sounds like a company assumes that their customers are dumb or something.

[aellwood]

Hi all.

 

I'm really into tech and cameras. 

I always thought that the RED Mini-Mags were a rip-off.

 

I mean, c'mon... US$2,500 for an SSD for an already mega expensive RED camera? 

That's less than any computer I've owned, less than most peoples PCs!

 

And what do you know... I found this video on my suggestions, and this proved my theory.

 

Not only are the SSDs quite low standard in term of SSD - MLC instead of SLC, standard mSATA - but it costs almost ten times as much.

 

What do you all think? Maybe the first party accessory isn't exactly worth it? 

[Aimi]

It's actually closer to $3,000 USD on the 960 GB model, apparently.

Anyway, not an expert on higher end cameras, but charging this much just for a first party SSD is insane. Hell, the specs aren't even that great going off Red's official listing for them.

So just based on this information, it looks like a rip-off to me.

[Thinking_Ego]

Just posted the same. To be expected somebody had already seen the video. Anyways how could we get someone like linus to see this?

[devang_n]

@LinusTech @nicklmg New video idea on RED cameras 

[KrYpToCiD]

I'll post this here and watch form my back seat.

P.S. This topic is archived on some videography forums since 2013 or 2014 xD 

 

https://www.cinema5d.com/whats-inside-a-red-mini-mag-the-controversy-jarred-lands-statement/

[debj]

Red provide all their cameras. Recently they did a red tear-down, Why not this topic?

 

 

I think someone create a DIY SSD housing for this cameras. 

[acxer]

To be honest, the size discrepancy isn't exactly rare. 1TB HDDs show 931GB usable. 512GB will show less also. And due to it being an SSD, there will be space reserved for SSD operations, overprovisioning that is.

 

Better explained:

"1GB according to the disk manufacturers is equal to 1,000,000,000 bytes. According to how the operating system (and the rest of the computing world) calculates it, it's equal to 1,024 megabytes, which in turn are equal to 1,024 kilobytes, which are themselves equal to 1,024 bytes. So one GB as per the disk manufacturer is really 1,000,000,000 / (1,024 x 1,024 x 1,024) = .931GB as measured by everybody else. So a "500GB" disk has 500 x .931GB of storage, or 465GB."

 

[SupaKomputa]

You guys missed the idea. Which is buying it for the case not the disk. lol

[NumLock21]

4 hours ago, debj said:

Red provide all their cameras. Recently they did a red tear-down, Why not this topic?

 

 

I think someone create a DIY SSD housing for this cameras. 

RED didn't provide them with any cameras. 2 of the RED Cameras they have, they bought it themselves.