Hi,
I don’t know if it’s too late for this suggestion, but I saw that the SSD has USB 3.2 Gen2x2. Macs don’t support Gen2x2 and therefore max out at regular USB 3.2 speeds (usually 600-900MB/s max). It would be better if the SSDs had USB4.0, which all Macs from M1 chip onwards are compatible with and can handle speeds of up to 3000MB/s+
–Christian
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Had no idea Macs don’t support that. Good catch.
Yes, I’d very gladly pay a little bit more to have usb4, instead of this weird standard macs can’t utilize
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Yes, USB 4 in the drive would be a much better solution, just as USB C in the camera should have a bandwidth of at least USB 3.0, not 2.0.
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I believe it was in a recent live stream that somebody suggested this and was told that due to the chipset support for RAID in the cards, USB4 wasn’t possible at this time. I might be muddling the exact technical details, but they had a reason it was limited to USB 3.2 2x2.
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For Mac users, USB 3.2 Gen2x2 is unfortunately not very useful, since macOS doesn’t support that mode. We really need Thunderbolt 4 or Thunderbolt 5 support to fully utilize the SSD’s speed and reliability. Without proper high-speed data transfer, the camera risks becoming a cumbersome and impractical tool for professional workflows. Macs with M1 and newer chips are all equipped with Thunderbolt, and supporting that standard would make a huge difference in real-world usability.
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This is very concerning for Mac users. We need the soeed
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As some of us were theorizing in the chat during the livestream, the best solve here is likely a dedicated reader that uses the same interface the drives are using with the camera to handle their super fast offload speeds. That way the reader itself could be compatible with whatever chipset format we’d need and would be upgradeable in the future for Thunderbolt 6, USB5 etc.
Same idea with a PCIe card that could slot into a tower computer and provide essentially a mag reader to PCIe gen6 interface for the maximum throughput directly to the motherboard, or even the ability to offload 2 mags simultaneously for multi camera shoots.
Ultimately the dedicated USB-C on the drive would then be rendered redundant and more of a nice-to-have feature when shooting in a remote environment where offload speed may not be the most important factor at play.
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Is there a commercial dedicated reader available right now?
Just another Mac ecosystem backer a lil bummed to see this today. I really hope there can be some kind of creative solution here as this will definitely create a bottleneck for quickly getting data off of a drive.
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Perhaps that’s a better solution. No built-in USB-C on the drive at all, just making a dedicated reader that is USB4.0.
No, they’re using a proprietary interface between the mags and the camera body. It may be a form of PCIe but I haven’t examined the mags in person. No dedicated reader announced yet but they seemed positive regarding the suggestion during the livestream
At this point in the design and manufacturing process I doubt it would make sense to eliminate the USB-C, and again it is functional in a pinch. It’s just a bummer that it won’t reach the full bandwidth specs the mag is capable of, particularly on Mac.
Don’t want to switch to Windows…
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Unless you’re offloading to an nvme drive in a USB4 chassis that is among the highest speed nvme drives on the market… I don’t think you will see a meaningful speed variance compared to offloading to something like a Samsung T9 over USB 3.2, but I’m happy to be proven wrong. Also I do believe there are several high speed docks which should allow you to get full rate transfers to a mac but I haven’t tested this myself.
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USB4.0, Thunderbolt 4, and now also Thunderbolt 5 and internal SSDs… all 3-5x faster than USB 3.2 speeds (as I mentioned USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 speeds are not obtainable on a Mac even when using a Gen 2x2 SSD, as it gets bottlenecked at regular 3.2 speeds, but USB4.0 is compatible and much faster than 3.2 Gen 2x2).
USB4.0 drives are readily available now, there’s a SanDisk Extreme Pro with USB4.0 (3000MB/s+)
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A very valid point. I wasn’t aware the pixboom mag was a 3.2gen2x2. But realistically when I dump footage, it’s to our NAS and the 10Gbe network is the bottleneck anyways.
If I get 900MB/s that’s fine.
This is why I purchased a second mag. No downtime due to dumping media like every other high speed camera I’ve worked with.
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