I know a few on here are using a samurai - we've had a strange issue, and I'm interested to see if anyone else has had similar.

Kit used:

F3
Samurai
Intel SSD

All with up to date firmware.

The samura has been performing fine, but yesterday we had a serious issue- we put the SSD in the samurai drive reader to transfer footage, and the mac gave the error "this disk is not readble by this computer"

Put back in samurai - not readable. Hooked the reader up to a PC - not readble.

We've lost some important footage. We were recording to SxS cards as well, but client was paying for higher bitrate material.

I've done some testing today, with a different SSD drive, and different computer. I've recreated the problem once. which is quite worrying.

Problem only occurs when putting the SSD in the samurai reader. Once the mac gives the message e'disk not readable", the SSD is essentially bricked, until formatted on the Samurai.

Needless to say, i've lost faith in using it on paid jobs. My gut feeling is something isnt right with the reader, not the samurai.

Waiting for a call back from samurai, and from cvp. Still doing some testing, to see if i can replicate the problem a third time.

Anyone else had and samurai issues?

Not seen that issue myself. So far it's been rock solid with the SSD's. Had vibration induced issues with HDD's, but that's to be expected. Also in Norway at -20c the Atomos supplied batteries were rubbish lasting only 10 or 15 mins while genuine Sony batts lasted 2 to 3 hours. At normal temps the Atomos Batteries have lasted many hours.

The reader is a pretty simple sata to firewire/usb adapter. If you have a spare external 2.5" drive you could possibly remove the drive from it's enclosure and then use the enclosure as a reader for the SSD, repeat your tests and see if the problem occurs again. Maplin sell a cheap data to USB adapter that should work: http://www.maplin.co.uk/usb-3.0-to-sata-hdd-bridge-517247

I have not had an trouble either using a 300GB Intel SSD . . . but I have only used the Samurai a few times so far. Thanks for the heads up, I will be extra cautious.

I'll be using it this weekend and there will be no backup if it fails.

I have also experienced this issue. Losing footage as well. Anyway, I had issues with my first Samurai which caused the problem. I haven't had problems with my current one. The issue showed itself on my intel 320 160gb

One other issue to watch for...
I put the Samurai in my camera bag, in a small pouch, with the batteries still mounted and it managed to turn itself on. In short order it was as hot as a toaster.

So, always remove the batteries.

I haven't had any issues with the drives, either SSD and HDD, not being readable. I do format them with each use. That might be an issue if you are just deleting the files, though many people do that without a problem (for awhile).

exFat is still using a file allocation table. Deleting the file without formatting is leaving a table that doesn't match the data.

I bet you could use a file recovery program and get your files back as long as they recorded in the first place and you haven't overwritten them..

Currently ONLY the Intel X25 40Gb, 80GB and 160GB SSD's are recommended for the Atomos products. These drives are from the X25-M range, not the newer X25-V range. I would be very cautious about using unsupported SSD's. Many SSD's have issues when used in video devices, not just the Samurai. If using Intel 320's in particular you must be very careful as Intel admit that these can suffer from something they call Bad Context 13x Error, where the drive effectively dies with the loss of all data if it is disconnected or reconnected to it's power source in anything other than a completely perfect manner, which could clearly be a regular occurrence in a device like the Samurai as you remove it and plug it in to the caddy. There is a firmware update for the 320 SSD's from intel

http://www.intel.com/go/ssdtoolbox/

But reading through the forums, it appears that the problem has not completely gone away even with the firmware update.

It's not a risk I would be happy with. I believe the 300GB Intel X25-V is actually from the 320 series. I believe the X25-M's are only available in sizes up to 160GB, but I could be wrong.

There's are good reasons why some SSD's and HDD's get approved and others don't. I use Intel X25-M 160GB drives, they are a little more expensive, but then what's your footage worth?

Alister,

Thank you for the warning. I wasn't even aware of any issue with those drives. I agree with you 100% that is a bad idea to try to save money buying less expensive drives or memory cards, but that was not my intention here. My decision to buy the drive I bought was not based on price at all. I just thought it would be a good drive compared to HDDs. Looks like I've got some work to do before I use the Samurai again this weekend. Thanks again for the warning.

Currently ONLY the Intel X25 40Gb, 80GB and 160GB SSD's are recommended for the Atomos products. These drives are from the X25-M range, not the newer X25-V range. I would be very cautious about using unsupported SSD's. Many SSD's have issues when used in video devices, not just the Samurai. If using Intel 320's in particular you must be very careful as Intel admit that these can suffer from something they call Bad Context 13x Error, where the drive effectively dies with the loss of all data if it is disconnected or reconnected to it's power source in anything other than a completely perfect manner, which could clearly be a regular occurrence in a device like the Samurai as you remove it and plug it in to the caddy. There is a firmware update for the 320 SSD's from intel

Intel(R) Redirect (http://www.intel.com/go/ssdtoolbox/)

But reading through the forums, it appears that the problem has not completely gone away even with the firmware update.

It's not a risk I would be happy with. I believe the 300GB Intel X25-V is actually from the 320 series. I believe the X25-M's are only available in sizes up to 160GB, but I could be wrong.

There's are good reasons why some SSD's and HDD's get approved and others don't. I use Intel X25-M 160GB drives, they are a little more expensive, but then what's your footage worth?


The Atmos site specifies the "x25" SSD, but most advertisers, including Intel refer to it as the x25M. Are they one in the same?
BTW, no problem so far with a 320 series 160GB SSD on the Samurai.

The drives specified by Atomos appear to be the original X25 series which came in 40, 80 and 160GB capacities, these are also known as the "X25-M".

last year Intel brought out the 320 series. Very similar to the original "X25-M", the 320 series go up to 300GB. Sometimes you will find the 320's referred to as "X25-V 320 series".

The Bad Context 13x Error only affects the 320 series drives, which would include drives referred to as "X25-V". The error occurs when removing power from the drive. When powered back up the drive becomes unreadable and all data is un-recoverable. There is no warning or other indication prior to the failure. The firmware update was supposed to fix the problem, but if you google the error you'll find plenty of reports of drives with the updated firmware failing in the same manner.

Just to put some perspective to this, there are also reports of OCZ and Crucial SSD's failing when used for video.

Thought I would share this excerpt found on one of the various forums:

"...in the meantime Intel's message is: don't stop buying the drives, only a small percentage of are affected. If you have one, back up your data regularly, as although the SSD 320 is non-volatile memory, the bug makes it very volatile indeed and you lose data.

Shut down your system in the standard way: don't just turn the power off. Also, try to minimise unplugging of the SSD 320 when your system is powered."

I guess the takeaway is that not all series 320 drives are affected by this bug.

Buying a SSD (a 320), and then an X25 for the Samurai got me interested in getting one for my Macbook Pro.

Last few days I've been reading everything I can get my hands on about SSDs, mostly via Anandtech. This news about X25s does not surprise me.

Suffice to say SSDs, while they have come a long way in the last 2-3 years, still have a bit to go before they are 100% rock solid. Intel X25s appear to have the best reliability short of some of Intel's enterprise offerings (most of which are based off of the X25 anyway, so Mr. Anand Shimpi says)

Incidentally, I put an OCZ Vertex3 in my 2011 Macbook Pro 17, and it's just off the planet fast now. It was tough to say before which was faster, my previous 2009 nehalem 8 core Mac Pro, or the new 17, but now it's a whole new ballgame.

Samurai recomended SDD drives now includes the 320 series.

Compatible Drives

Manufacturer Model Capacity Speed
HHD
Hitachi Travelstar 7K/Z7K Series 320GB - 750GB 7200 rpm
Hitachi Travelstar 5K/Z5K Series 320GB - 750GB 5400 rpm
Western Digital Scorpio Black 500GB - 750GB 7200 rpm
Seagate Momentus 500GB - 750GB 7200 rpm
Toshiba MK7559GSXP 750GB 5400 rpm
SSD
Intel X25 series 40GB, 80GB,160B limited stock
Intel 320 series 40GB, 80GB, 120GB, 160GB, 300GB, or 600GB
OCZ Vertex 3 120GB - 480GB
OCZ Agility 3 120GB - 480GB
Solid State Drives are designed in such a way that the smaller the capacity the slower the drive will perform. Please bear this in mind when purchasing SSD drives

Ouch, recommending a drive known to fail catastrophically. I'll stick to my X25's until Intel sort the 320's out. Maybe not every 320 is going to fail, maybe the majority are OK, but a quick google search shows it not to be an isolated problem. Would you buy SxS cards if Sony said we know there's a problem, it doesn't happen often, but you could loose all your data. Caveat Emptor. It's russian roulette with your footage. If I was in Atomos's shoes I don't think I would recommend the 320's as very often it only takes one person to have a catastrophic loss to give a product a bad name and the end user will blame Atomos not realising it might be an Intel issue.

A lot of the Atomos pages need updating with the new list.

Of course double recording, internally as well as externally gives you some insurance.

Solid State Drives are designed in such a way that the smaller the capacity the slower the drive will perform. Please bear this in mind when purchasing SSD drives

Can I regurgitate some info I just picked up from Anandtech? It seems any drive made in the last 1-2 years has plenty of headroom to write the 35MB/sec Prores HQ requires. Only the oldest drives could run into problems. (again, not an expert, just paraphrasing 4 articles from Anandtech) Smaller drives fall down in random writes, which our Samurai will never do.

That said, some of the WORST, OLDEST drives would probably crap out when close to full.

Just another comment on the new list of drives from Samurai...it seems pretty much all issues from SSDs come from the vast variety of SATA controllers and OS combinations not playing nice with the SSD controller. It would not surprise me that an SSD known to have problems amongst the PC enthusiast crowd to work just fine consistently with one known scenario (i.e. the Samurai), because it's always the same hardware, and it's always written to in the same manner, over and over again.

If nothing else, all this SSD talk just hammers home to me the importance of rolling to SxS for backup at the same time. No biggie, it's good practice anyway.

Following this thread closely, I don't see any reports of problems with spinning disks like the Scorpios that are Atomos recommended. This failure issue appears to only be occurring with SSD drives.

I have used both SSD and Scorpios with Samurai without (so far) any problems at all related to disk crashing or data loss. I've found that taking advantage of the longer record times for static tripod type of shots work just fine with Scorpios and anything with camera movement short of easy dolly moves as well as short record time subjects would necessitate and allow for the use of SSD drives.

What I am getting from this thread is that the safe procedure is to power down the Samurai unit prior to ejecting the cartridge, and I would guess inserting the cartridge into the Atomos reader prior to plugging it into the computer port. Correct me please if I am wrong about any of this.

I have used both SSD and Scorpios with Samurai without (so far) any problems at all related to disk crashing or data loss. I've found that taking advantage of the longer record times for static tripod type of shots work just fine with Scorpios and anything with camera movement short of easy dolly moves as well as short record time subjects would necessitate and allow for the use of SSD drives.


I had spinning drives in my original Red One 320gb mag. They worked just fine for almost all work, but there were a couple times when they caused problems and dropped frames.

One was a Green Day concert I directed 3 years ago. 11 Reds. The 2 cameras closest to speaker stacks dropped frames all night, even when we took extreme precautions to insulate the drives from the sound energy. Loud sound, whether it amplified music, gunshots, etc will cause hard drives to screw up. When I say loud, I mean loud (estimated 115db+). This also happened on a few music videos where the shot was too close to the playback systems monitors. Moving either cam or monitor would fix it.

The other is vehicle mounts, but Atomos already warns about this.

So absolutely, spinning drives in my 2 year experience with the Red One worked pretty much every time except for twice. Just wanted to share what few problems I did have with spinning drives, because it is possible to get comfortable with them and forget where they will screw up.

Thanks Nate, your comments about loud speakers remind me vividly of shooting music concerts with tube cameras (back in the day as they say) and having what we then called "microphonics" occur in the picture. This would either be a rolling ac-hum type of distortion or a pulsing of the picture to the music. But I digress . . .

No one in their right mind would easily ignore the fact of potential spinning drive failures, especially after so many years of personal computer hard drive failures. Perhaps the manufacturers lull us into a false sense of security with their million hour MTBF specs on most drives.

I'm shooting a green screen shot next week and plan on using a 500GB Scorpio drive on a Samurai for extra recording time because the talent, as usual wants to go as soon as she gets there so no time to swap out SSD drives.

I experienced same issue with SSD drive as a standalone backup drive connected to Mac FireWire port. The drive became unreadable, all files lost, not recoverable. I could reproduce issue with a cable disconnect with power applied. Sent the drive back to the vendor who updated firmware. I have had no issues after the firmware update.
The drive was from Other World Computing.com. Which was a earlier SSD type, I purchased one year ago.

I have not had an trouble either using a 300GB Intel SSD . . . but I have only used the Samurai a few times so far. Thanks for the heads up, I will be extra cautious.

I'll be using it this weekend and there will be no backup if it fails.

Update.
I went ahead did my shoot last weekend and decided to take no extra precautions with the Intel SSD. I am happy to report that everything worked perfectly with the Samurai and the Intel SSD. It was great that the Samurai can now be trigged from the special SDI signal instead of timecode. I just mounted the Samurai on a c-stand underneath my 17" monitor, fed it the signal from my F800, and never gave it a second thought the rest of the day. In about 8 hours of shooting, I never ran out of batteries on the Samurai. All the raw footage has been downloaded and already edited without a hitch.

So far, I have had the same positive result as Doug with the Samurai and Intel SSD.
No problems in over 60 hours of usage. I do, as a habit, power down before removing the card, but I have always done that, as well, with the Nanoflash.

Like Chuck, I also am careful about powering down properly -- as I am with all media except SxS and XDCAM optical.
I also put the SSD into the docking unit before I plug it into the firewire 800 port of my Mac.

It's Interesting to hear how others are getting on, and what drives your using/

An update with our Samurai:

It was updated with firmware 2.7, and then flew off with a fellow cameraman to italy for a weeks shoot.

We decided against intel SSD's since it was an intel drive we'd had the original issue with.

Instead we were using Firestorm SSDs, which we fully and repeatedly tested prior to shoot. (including maxing out the drive, repeatedly copying off and on the drive, shock tests, and some software read/write tests to see how it handles sustained data rates) and we were happy with how they performed.

Our cameraman out in Italy reported no problems with the drives themselves, but reporting a different issue with the samurai: he was getting the occasional green screen issue when recording, where the screen of the unit would turn green, record green footage, and only go back to normal after a reboot. According to Atomos, this should have been fixed in firmware version 2.7, which it was running.

Luckily nothing mission critical was lost on the shoot.

Since my he returned, we've updated to firmware version 2.8 (came out on the 14th), and i've been testing the unit today - seems absolutely flawless so far - even when performing 'bad practice' like unplugging the SDI cable whilst it's recording.

I'm hesitant to recommend the samurai after the issues we've had, but I hope, in time my confidence will be restored!

It's also probably worth downloading the latest firmware version, and installing it, if you haven't already:

The Samurai - Firmware (http://www.atomos.com/samurai/firmware/)

Quick update - on the latest round of filming out in Italy, our samurai failed again and started recording pink and green footage again. (And this is on firmware version 2.8, which should have cured the issue.)

However, I have to sing the praises of atomos - they've been on the phone this morning, and they were exceptionally polite and pro-active. They made it clear their priority is make sure we have a fully working unit as quickly as possible.

- Apparently they've had no complaints about pink and green gootage since the latest firmware update, so they believe our unit is faulty.

They've arranged a replacement unit to be sent out and should arrive tomorrow - can't get more helpful than that!

Rare to get such good customer service these days. I should have approached them in the first place instead of our supplier.


Mods - any chance of moving this to the samurai forum? its more of a samurai issue than an F3 one

Good to know Peter. Problems can occur with any of the complex electronic gear we all use nowadays and it's how the supplier reacts that makes all the difference.

Got my eye on one of these units for my EX3 so keep us updated on how it goes! Let's hope that with the new unit all will be well.

I've been using the Samurai on every F3 shoot (even if I actually don't need the files) just to see if it would hiccup. So far, it is 100% rock solid during both shooting and ingest.