 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 GinniMag, a maker of third-party non-certified mags 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 GinniTech's original video has gone viral to the point where RED CEO Jared Land has had to issue statements to the media defending RED's 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. Corsair's new Hydro-X series of custom cooling components includes water blocks, reservoirs, fittings, adapters, and more. Check them out at the link below. To kick things off, we're gonna need a Torx number 6 bit to remove the four screws on the bottom of our RED Mini-Mag. Step 2. 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 adapter. It's there's no logic built into it whatsoever. And step 4. 5. I don't know whatever step we're on. Inspect the SSD, which is there's your controller. There's your DRAM cache, and there's one two three four five six seven eight NAND flash module. So this is a high capacity RED Mag. It's a storefly 300 CE, 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 teardowns 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 out of scene 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 Ginny 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 Land's reliability justification for the cost of a RED mag is bull spit. 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 Ginny 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 Ginny 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, Ginny Mag 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 Vertian 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 Vertian store fly with some Toshiba NAND chips on it and 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 RED's story is the firmware. So then is that special? This is where things get a bit nuanced. GiniTech 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 M-SATA SSD in a mag 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 GiniTech's use of real information that RED's 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 vendor's 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 mag becomes a RED product, not a Verdian 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 GiniTech has misled the cinema community and massaged their message up till this point, but RED is far from blameless here. Let's change gears. Now as a techie, I am not too offended by some of RED's claims. For example, that a physical adapter couldn't have been created between the original RED mag and the current mini mag. It could have been done quite easily given that both of them are just mSATA SSDs in a 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 RED's claim that they spend millions of dollars on R&D around their media recording. Now if RED is talking about RED Code RAW, their proprietary compressed RAW file format, sure, I'll buy that. It's kind of awesome. But GiniTech 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 by RED, is so well supported across multiple platforms including the cameras that record them and the PCs and Macs that need to read from them during footage ingest. The other really offensive thing that Jared hasn't been entirely forthright about is exactly what aspect of RED's firmware development has been infringed by GiniTech. 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 mag is written to RED's own 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 mag. Basically, every time you press the record button, you create a folder instead of a single large clip and that folder is going to be full of as many 4 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 4 gig file size limit of the FAT32 file system. FAT32 is desirable for its simplicity, its high throughput, and of course, its 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 too. 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 the 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 has always really pissed me off is their nonsense about how much they managed to spend on R&D without coming to the same basic conclusion that the entire storage industry came to decades ago. Nothing is perfect. Not your consumer thing, not your server grade 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 backward 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 1 Meg 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 GiniTek's motivation here and the way that this has suddenly blown up highly questionable, but Red 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 smartphone, 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.ting.com We're gonna have that linked 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 Ting out for a month with no strings attached, and if you switch to Ting using our link down below, that's linus.ting.com, you will get 25 bucks in credit on the Ting store that you can use towards your first bill or even a new device. Go check it out. And you know what? Thank you guys for watching. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button, but if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, and maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one in our community forum, which you should totally join.