NVME SSD tested with Pocket 4K BMPCC

Blackmagic Design Pocket Cinema Camera 4K with External NVME SSD

Question: Can you finally record 60fps uncompressed RAW 4K DCI Externally to an NVME SSD?


Result = Total Failure

No Card Present...


Contender #1. Samsung 970 EVO 500GB with SEQUENTIAL WRITE : Up to 2,300 MB/s
with the JMicron NVME to USB adapter receives power from the BMPCC4K but never shows up as Media no matter how many 3rd party cable swaps or gender changes attempted (Apple cable, expensive cable, cheap cable, USB C 3.1 to A to C back again), as opposed to a simple Startech USB to Sata SSD adapter which simply works with far slower SATA SSD media.

It works on PC well enough.

Let's hope Blackmagic Design issues a firmware update soon to accept NVME external drives via USB...

I'm going to try one in the morning. Different drive and different USB adapter.

I think your brick wall is going to be the gen1 USB3.1 port on the camera No NVME will fix that problem.

I suspect that when braw is release for this camera it will be enough to handle it at max.

So, turns out the enclosure I have is SATA, not NVME: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0788 ... UTF8&psc=1

I tested with some no-name card stripped from a laptop. I was able to record uncompressed up to 30P, and 3:1 up to 60P.

Cross posting from another part of this forum:

I tested a Samsung Pro 970 512GB NVMe SSD drive, in an enclosure. The camera is USB-C 3.1 Gen1, and this enclosure is Gen 2. I'd assume it would work, but the camera won't recognize it at all, no matter which way it's formatted (OS X Journaled, ExFAT, FAT, APFS). I'm going to keep testing this because the 970 is blazingly fast on the BM speed test, using my MacBook Pro 15" 2018. About twice as fast as the T5. I'd hoped that I could take footage out of this enclosure, and into a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure, for insanely fast backups.

[...]

Finally I couldn't get the 1TB G-DRIVE R-Series USB 3.1, Glyph 1TB Atom USB 3.1, nor the Glyph Atom RAID 4TB USB 3.1. I understand the latter, but those first two should surely work. Part of me wonder's if BM is deliberately preventing the camera from showing a drive it doesn't specifically recognize – which I find hard to believe given BM's general philosophy.

What's interesting is that I can get an SD card or the T5 to work through a USB-C hub, a regular HooToo.

[...]

I've tried everything I can think of:
- Different cables, that have proven to work with the T5.
- Powering the BMPCC4K via DC.
- Formatting the SSD any way I can.
- Plugging in the T5 and then switching out the NVMe without turning off the camera.
- Plugging in and out the SD card while the NVMe is connected.
- Switching recording modes and resolutions.

The enclosure I'm testing seems to be a rather popular one, although I'm not sure I can post a link to it here (I'm a new user). You can find it on Amazon named "ADWITS USB 3.1 UASP to PCIe NVMe M.2 2230/2242/2260/2280 High-Performance SSD Adapater".

I'm talking to a few PC repair shops in my city and will be visiting them to test various enclosures. If I can nail this down it'll be worth it I think. I hope that the NVMe format isn't somebody incompatible entirely.

There may be a reason that the drive doesn’t Mount so it won’t show it. It’s likely detected something is there but if it can’t mount it, it can’t format it or read/write it.


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I know that much, I'm wondering why. It shouldn't be a power issue – perhaps there's a translation issue between an NVMe drive and the SATA interface?

Sometimes I’ll have a regular drive connected by USB3 Type A or even a card in the Wise card reader that doesn’t mount if the file organization isn’t ExFAT or HFS+. On the Mac, I can usually load Disk Utility and execute the Mount command and then proceed. There’s some failure in the handshaking going on that seems to prevent the drive from automatically mounting that may not be related to SATA versus NMVe. As you say, “Why?” Unfortunately in the camera we don’t have the Mount command to get over the hurdle.


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Perhaps I'm not understanding it fully. I've formatted the NVMe SSD (and Samsung T5) in Disk Utility while testing everything. Formatting it anyway I could.

Are talking about when a drive is plugged into a Mac, say, and it wants to initialize it? Surely that wouldn't be needed if the drive was formatted correctly?

interesting results may be had with other alternative solutions- progress is being made, but none on the NVME route for now...

let's keep up hopes BMD engineers read our comments and follows our trails...