CF-to-SATA hardware interface for RAW recording (fork)

Started by Grunf, May 17, 2013, 03:10:09 PM

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Drizzt321

Quote from: nightvision04 on June 22, 2013, 08:56:59 AM
I can second that. It's a great card, but it's not close to the 150 Mbps write that they claim.

Was this the 16GB or 32/64GB card?

Looking at the 16GB card image, it shows W of 95 MB/s, while the 32GB shows 150MB/s. Not saying you're wrong, just curious which you got because the larger capacity 32/64GB likely has more NAND dies which means more dies for parallel writes which generally means higher peak write speeds.

tonybeccar

Excuse me! Is this DIY project useful for this?

http://www.davidhunt.ie/?p=2641

It's basically a raspberry pi which communicates with the camera via USB.. and can download the material on realtime to a hard drive.. I don't know if the USB speeds are that high.. but I think it's an interesting project.. the author managed to do lots of stuff with it.. maybe even could open a wide range of possibilites for magic lantern! (i'm just wondering lol)..

eatstoomuchjam

Quote from: tonybeccar on August 04, 2013, 09:56:16 AM
Excuse me! Is this DIY project useful for this?

http://www.davidhunt.ie/?p=2641

It's basically a raspberry pi which communicates with the camera via USB.. and can download the material on realtime to a hard drive.. I don't know if the USB speeds are that high.. but I think it's an interesting project.. the author managed to do lots of stuff with it.. maybe even could open a wide range of possibilites for magic lantern! (i'm just wondering lol)..

The theoretical maximum speed for USB 2 is 480 megabits/second (60MB/s) and even with the best controllers, that throughput is rarely seen in real life.  Not likely to be useful at all in this case.

kukysimon

not sure if this is an option here for you:


a single optical fiber can carry much more data than electrical cables such as standard category 5 Ethernet cabling, which typically runs at 100 Mbit/s or 1 Gbit/s speeds.
Fiber optic can transfer data at 100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, and 40 Gbps

Samuel H

The problem right now is not that the electrical interface is not fast enough (SATA3 is 600 MB/s, or about 7 times faster than we actually need), but that we can't fool the camera into thinking it has a standard CF card and at the same time translate the received data for the SATA controller.

gyf304

Well, I kind of came up with this idea a few years ago when I figured out that CF has an identical electrical interface as IDE, just in different arrangements. I looked online but no solution could be found. The solution I can provide is a CF-Zif converter and then a Zif-IDE Converter, all pure passive converters(Well, some have 5V-3.3V converters but they can be shorted out). So it might actually work! Never tried it, but sounds promising.

hirethestache

@HireTheStache
www.HireTheStache.com
C100, 5D3, 5D2, 6D

gyf304


gyf304

Quote from: albert-e on June 23, 2013, 11:04:05 PM
This information I gathered about the CIS.  It is very rare to find a CF card slot implemented as anything other than a hardwired True-IDE device. You can't access the CIS unless the slot is wired as a PCMCIA-type implementation. There's no reason to look at the CIS for a flash disk card; it's only useful for I/O type cards. So, Canon cameras are what, memory mapped I/O cards?

In some situations, you can however use the ATA Identify command to get some vendor information about the card. There's a command hdparm -I (or -Istdout for the raw data) to see what this will give you in a system but not from USB attached device.

To prove the specification I will perform a elementary tests(like in the past);I'll connect a CF microdrive to my Canon 50D,7D, and see if the camera recognizes the card. In theory , this test setup should work. I'll get a microdrive first. I don't care about the transfer rate at the moment, 16Mb/s. We'll see.

To be continued...

Tried that, won't work. A seagate 5GB drive.

saary

Greetings,,

i wonder if there is any update regard the project

thanks all


saary

what happened to the project. don't kill it please  :'(

Samuel H

I abandoned development when I saw lots of real engineers already working on it. It seems they're stuck because the camera does some out-of-spec stuff, or otherwise requires something that a standard mechanical CF-to-IDE adapter plus IDE-to-SATA adapter won't do. If that's the case, the adapter would have to be more complicated, with a custom chip probably, and that makes it a lot more expensive and slow to develop.

In any case, with Transcend 128GB 1000x CF cards offering storage for 24 minutes of 1920x1080-24p RAW video for $300, my interest in this has fallen considerably...

kgv5

In a couple of days i will test nexto di 2730 portable HDD with CF and SD slot. 500GB onboard will give about an hour of raw footage, i hope that transfer speed will be sufficient to offload one card during filling the other one.
www.pilotmovies.pl   5D Mark III, 6D, 550D

albert-e

Quote from: gyf304 on August 20, 2013, 05:54:27 AM
Tried that, won't work. A seagate 5GB drive.

FYI, the Microdrive uses 5V; Canon outputs or uses 3.3V.

albert-e

Quote from: Samuel H on September 09, 2013, 12:22:35 PM
I abandoned development when I saw lots of real engineers already working on it. It seems they're stuck because the camera does some out-of-spec stuff, or otherwise requires something that a standard mechanical CF-to-IDE adapter plus IDE-to-SATA adapter won't do. If that's the case, the adapter would have to be more complicated, with a custom chip probably, and that makes it a lot more expensive and slow to develop.

In any case, with Transcend 128GB 1000x CF cards offering storage for 24 minutes of 1920x1080-24p RAW video for $300, my interest in this has fallen considerably...

Ditto!

Midphase

It appears as if there is an unsurmountable write speed bottleneck in the cameras that an SSD drive option probably won't fix, particularly considering that 1200X cards don't seem to be able to reach speeds greater than what we can already get with 1000X cards.

Add to it the fact that there appear to be issues with cards larger than 128gb which might create problems with SSD drives, and the fact that 1050X 128gb cards are coming down in price considerably, and I would think that the whole idea of trying to add an SSD drive to the camera somehow becomes unnecessary.

Samuel H

For me, the main reason for using an SSD instead of a CF card was always price: if a 128GB 1000x card is $600 and a 180GB SSD is $100, well, I would be very happy if I could buy this adapter for $300. But with a good 128GB 1000x card at $300, well, it's not so attractive...

GroverHouse

Total sidetrack...What about thunderbolt?

Thought this was an interesting bringing in thunderbolt to the equation
http://texassoundguy.blogspot.com/2013/04/creating-thunderbolt-compact-flash-card.html

Makes me wonder if this is really an attempt here at make a Black Betty type camera rather than an CF media alternative :)

albert-e

Quote from: Samuel H on September 10, 2013, 01:48:20 PM
For me, the main reason for using an SSD instead of a CF card was always price: if a 128GB 1000x card is $600 and a 180GB SSD is $100, well, I would be very happy if I could buy this adapter for $300. But with a good 128GB 1000x card at $300, well, it's not so attractive...

Soon the prices will come down. Meanwhile, this is one reason I suspended my project:
News from Sandisk, 256 GB Extreme Pro CompactFlash card unveiled by SanDisk
http://pulse.me/s/qcbFi
SanDisk has unveiled a new high-capacity storage solution for photographers and videographers using devices supporting the CompactFlash format. The ne... Read more

Midphase

"SanDisk says that the new memory card provides minimum sustained write speeds of 65 MB per second"

Isn't that too slow for full HD raw capture?

SDX

You can also get 95 MBs SD cards.
The problem is the camera, which won't do that speed ;)

Grunf

Camera bus is limited to 167MB/sec (so are all CF cards used in MK III). That is plenty enough for 1080p24.

enliten

i'm going to revive this thread to paste this link

http://www.sycard.com/cfext182.html

it's an extender for CF. I did notice earlier in the thread that somebody tried soldering pins directly on the CF card. This little device may make things easier.

-Ben

arrinkiiii

It's not more easy to make an Nexto ?  HDD + CF input + battery  ?!?

Don't have 400 dollars to buy one but maybe making one? In locations would be s nice to have one, 2.5 hdd are cheap...


http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/797720-REG/Nexto_DI_ND2730500G_ND2730_Digital_Photo_Storage.html