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between me and brandon i think it's fair to say we've received literally hundreds

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of requests to weigh in on the controversy surrounding red digital

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cinema and the expensive proprietary red

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minimag media format that they sell for use in their cameras now it recently

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came to light through gini meg a maker of third-party non-certified mags that

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contrary to what red has been telling us over the years the red mini mag is in

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fact not a special product that was

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developed after countless hours of r d but rather a simple consumer ssd with an

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interface adapter in a fancy enclosure now i had assumed that

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people would lose interest in this story and i decided to just leave it alone but

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it's escalated to the point where genetech's original video has gone viral

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to the point where red ceo jared land has had to issue statements to the media

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defending red's position and his products so then it's time to break our

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silence and break this down for y'all

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starting of course with a breakdown of our own 960 gig mini mag

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time for some surgery brought to you by the corsair hydrox

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corsair's new hydrox series of custom cooling components includes water blocks

18
00:01:16,720 --> 00:01:26,790
reservoirs fittings adapters and more check them out at the link below

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to kick things off we're gonna need a torx number six bit to remove the four

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screws on the bottom of our red mini mag

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step two pry open the aluminum enclosure

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step four remove the interface adapter which as

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you guys can see is just a simple pin to pin

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connection adapter it's uh there's no logic built into it whatsoever

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and step four five i don't know whatever step we're on

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inspect the ssd which is uh there's your controller

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there's your dram cache there's one two three four five six seven eight nand

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flash module so this is a high capacity red mag it's a storefly 300 ce whatever

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the hell that is so no in fact it is not special hardware

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but this isn't a surprise to me and it shouldn't be a surprise to you now

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shockingly i actually can't find any tear downs of red mini mags online

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that weren't done in the last few days since this story broke

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but i've known about this for years and i've

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even complained publicly that red is selling regular old msata ssds out of

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scene markups they're not even pci express

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m sata ssds in a fancy red enclosure oh

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and you don't even get red it's like it's a black enclosure if you don't buy

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the 480 or the 960 gig it just took until now to blow up

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why well it seems to come from this video

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from ginitech a small time maker of knockoff megs and that's actually the

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biggest reason that i had intended to ignore this whole thing i have no desire

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to draw attention to them especially because given what i know about social

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media marketing it wouldn't surprise me if some of the outrage over this is

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actually bots created by ginny tech themselves but whether that's the case

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or not here we are so let's take a quick look at both the valid points and the

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misleading arguments that they make in their video that they position as an

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expose but that is ultimately designed to put pressure on red and then

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ultimately sell you their product so right out of the gate they present forum

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posts from red users about failed mags as evidence that jaredland's reliability

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justification for the cost of a redmag is bullspit

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now the problem with that is that without knowing the sample size

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a dozen or even a hundred failures is

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not necessarily an indication that there is a significant problem with product

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quality or validation the second problem is the way that gini tech repeatedly

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attacks red for their made in the usa

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claims now red didn't meet the requirements and that's pretty scummy

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but to their credit at least they backed down removing the message from their

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site and their products so given that it is hypocritical at best for ginny to

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hammer away at this point when their site still seems to suggest that their

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products originate in the uk and as red actually alluded to in a

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court filing ginnymag even used to make similar claims about their products

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being made in the uk when their components are obviously sourced from

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other countries in a similar manner now as for the 480 and 960 versus 512 gig

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and one terabyte advertised capacity scandal

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red really should have communicated this better but they also haven't said

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anything outright false here the raw capacity of any 480 gigabyte ssd is

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gigabytes that's just the way that nand flash manufacturing works and it's up to

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the integrator in this case vertian

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to determine how much of that 512 gigs or one

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terabyte as it were to allocate to spare area

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spare area improves both performance and longevity now red never should have

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advertised them as 512 gigs if all 512

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gigs weren't accessible but they weren't

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technically wrong because physically there is 512 gigs of flash on the drive

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now as for the claim about the quality of the non-commodity media that red uses

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so mine is a virgin storefly with some

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toshiba nan chips on it it's fine and from an industrial brand

78
00:06:02,080 --> 00:06:09,759
but neither the nand flash nor the controller is anything super special

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of course a big part of red story is the firmware so then is that special

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this is where things get a bit nuanced ginitech is 100 correct in asserting

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that the commodity ssds that red's using contain standard firmware

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but he doesn't say that they don't also contain extra bits one thing he doesn't

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show in his video is that while the camera does recognize any random msata

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ssd in a mag enclosure popped into the side of it it actually will not write to

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it at full speed unless the user takes extra steps to fool the camera into

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thinking that it is in fact a genuine mag

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so the main problem that we run into here is ginitech's use of real

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information that red's hardware and firmware are not in fact special to draw

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a misleading conclusion no evidence is

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actually given to demonstrate that these low-cost consumer-grade ssds

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the camera's functionality and

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the faking of customized firmware is

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really no different from the way that an nvidia board partner fakes the model

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number of their reference board to include their vendor information because

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here's the thing once the product ships in a gigabyte or

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an evga box and is covered by that vendor's warranty rather than the

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warranty of whatever factory built the launch boards for nvidia it is in fact a

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gigabyte or an evga or an asus product

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even if the different model number basically amounted to altering a couple

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of strings in the firmware so that it's detected by the software correctly a red

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meg becomes a red product not a verdian

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or micron product as soon as red ships

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it to you with their support attached to it no foul play

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at least that would be the case if red hadn't been so disingenuous about the

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way that they've marketed these things over the years

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now i've been fairly focused on the way that gini tech has misled the cinema

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community and massaged their message up till this point but red is far from

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blameless here let's change gears now as a techie i'm not too offended by

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some of red's claims for example that a physical adapter couldn't have been

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created between the original redmag and the current minimag

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it could have been done quite easily given that both of them are just msata

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ssds in a whoops fancy machined box

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but the thing is adapters do add more points of failure and i wouldn't

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necessarily want to support that either so whatever

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the one thing that really annoys me is reds claim that they spend millions of

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dollars on r d around their media recording now if red is talking about

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red code raw their proprietary compressed raw file format

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sure i'll buy that it's kind of awesome

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but ginny tech makes a very fair point in their video pointing out that the

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customer already paid for red raw when they

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bought the camera the red mini mag uses

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nothing but a standard sata interface

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and red would be crazy to use anything other than sata because sata which has

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had millions of dollars spent on its development just not by red is so well supported

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across multiple platforms including the cameras that record to them and the pcs

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and macs that need to read from them during footage ingest

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the other really offensive thing that jared hasn't been entirely forthright

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about is exactly what aspect of red's

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firmware development has been infringed by ginitech

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in spite of all the evidence to the contrary he still seems to be

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at least suggesting that it is some kind

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of proprietary ssd firmware

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algorithm but it seems far more likely

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to me that it's simply a drm scheme

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now to be clear from a legal standpoint that makes him right

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00:10:16,399 --> 00:10:22,079
his product has been infringed just

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not in a way that makes me feel bad for him at all calling the way that the meg is written

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to red's own is misleading at best

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let's break down how it works this is a really nice video from jersey

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filmmaker covering the unusual way that red writes video files to a meg

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basically every time you press the record button

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you create a folder instead of a single

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large clip and that folder is going to be full of as many four gig files as it

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takes to record the footage until you press stop your editing software then

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automatically stitches these many clips together

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now if you've been around the block as many times as i have you'll know that

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this is nothing but a simple work around for the four gig file size limit of the

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fat32 file system fat32 is desirable for

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its simplicity its high throughput and

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of course it's cross-platform compatibility

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but it's the furthest possible thing from red's own

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and red's own way of doing things has other archaic workarounds too instead of

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allowing an individual clip to be deleted from the mag after a bad take

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for example red requires that the entire

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mag be formatted before use now their claim is that this is to

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protect the user from accidental deletions but as far as i can tell it's

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just to compensate for their basic ass ssds

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here's the thing a full format with security race reduces the write speed

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penalty that comes with overwriting previously used flash cells

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so it's pretty much a cost saving measure which is kind of sad when you

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consider how widely available better ssds that would not require this

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limitation are these days so yeah repackaging commodity products and

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marking them up 10 times upsets me but

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ultimately as a customer nobody is forcing me to buy this

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it's not like i don't know the price ahead of time so i don't have a ton of

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ground to stand on no the thing that has always really pissed me off is their

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nonsense about how much they managed to

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spend on r d without coming to the same

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basic conclusion that the entire storage

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industry came to decades ago nothing

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is perfect not your consumer thing not your server grade thing nothing is

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perfect and for anything to be truly

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professional grade it must have

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redundancy now red admits outright that they spend

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a lot of time performing data recovery services on their customers media so to

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me then that would indicate that they are well aware that their media does in

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fact fail i do applaud their efforts to help their customers recover their data

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not everybody does this but the issue for me is that data

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recovery is an ass backward solution and

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when i read a statement like that from a company's ceo i can't help but think

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that red has weighed the cost of data recovery against the cost of actually

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engineering a more robust solution

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and decided you know what it's just not worth it to create something better

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they've determined that putting your footage at risk is worth it compared to

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the cost of engineering a raid 1 mag solution that would only increase their

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cost per meg by about double which we can see that they could easily

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absorb while almost never requiring data

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recovery which guys even if you do get the footage back causes stress and lost

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productivity that their customers will never get back anyway

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nothing here was a revelation to me and i find both genie tech's motivation here

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00:14:10,240 --> 00:14:17,600
and the way that this has suddenly blown up highly questionable

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but red has never put me in a position to feel bad for them so from my

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00:14:19,519 --> 00:14:26,240
perspective guys you are reaping what you've sown

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these are the dangers of magic black box

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00:14:26,240 --> 00:14:34,320
marketing once the illusion fails people feel justifiably betrayed and pissed off

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00:14:32,560 --> 00:14:38,639
so i would recommend being honest in the first place next time usually the

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00:14:36,720 --> 00:14:43,279
engineering is cooler than the magic story anyway and if it's not

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00:14:41,199 --> 00:14:48,800
engineer it better next time like with real-time redundancy for my footage

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