Pocket 6K (Pro + G2) not compatible with USB4 drives

Hey all,

I work with tech and have come across multiple USB4 M.2 enclosures, these are great and extremely high speed, but when plugged in to my blackmagic cameras... nothing. I have tried 3 different enclosures, with different controllers, and different (known working with blackmagic) drives, and a dozen (known good on blackmagic and known good for thunderbolt 4) cables.

I can only assume the Blackmagic OS 8.1's underlying Linux kernel does not have the patches to support these new drives. 8.1 is the latest firmware available for Pocket 6K's.

I would really like to have one drive for my personally carry and shooting, so is there anything I can do to make these drives get recognised? Is there a way to report this to blackmagic? Or is this working on the new cinema 6k FF and these older cameras are simply forgotten?

Thanks in advance,

[Kristian Lam]

Hi,

You're not going to get any speed advantages as we use a 5Gbps USB port but it's probably worth logging this issue by contacting our support team with the make/model of your enclosure.

Hey all,

I work with tech and have come across multiple USB4 M.2 enclosures, these are great and extremely high speed, but when plugged in to my blackmagic cameras... nothing. I have tried 3 different enclosures, with different controllers, and different (known working with blackmagic) drives, and a dozen (known good on blackmagic and known good for thunderbolt 4) cables.

I can only assume the Blackmagic OS 8.1's underlying Linux kernel does not have the patches to support these new drives. 8.1 is the latest firmware available for Pocket 6K's.

I would really like to have one drive for my personally carry and shooting, so is there anything I can do to make these drives get recognised? Is there a way to report this to blackmagic? Or is this working on the new cinema 6k FF and these older cameras are simply forgotten?

Thanks in advance,

This may be a case of USB4 (or Thunderbolt 3 or 4) drives drawing (sometimes periodically) too much power; especially NvME based SSD drives.

An example: A SanDisk Extreme Pro 1TB 10 GBit drive (years old, pre current SanDisk “problems”) will not work on iPhone 15 Pro (too much power required), on my CalDigit Elements Hub (Thunderbolt/USB 4) the drive periodically fails (especially during write) connected to the USB A port (10 GBit, but “only” 5V max 7.5W) and never ever, when connected to USB C port (10GBit 3.2 or 40GBit Thunderbolt allowing up to 15W power draw).

The “periodic fail” has a nasty side effect of sometimes requiring a “MacOS consistency check” on drive content, before continued use, but… mid-write emergency shutdown of one or more SSD’s may not result in the most reliable content. Hence never repeated again after some “optimistic experiments”.

All of my USB C (3.x compatible) NvME based SSD drives (Yottamaster, SanDisk, Samsung, Orico etc) draw too much power to even start under iPhone 15 Pro (iPhone luckily complain, and disables the use), mostly fail during longing writes on the CalDigit device (problem: The device does not prevent (over) optimistic use), but never when connected directly to a PC or Notebook (Windows, MacOS or Linux), where the ports typically are designed to deliver the required maximum power.

This may behave deceivingly reliable even via a Thunderbolt connection, when “only” and “actively” using one or two drives (max 2 times 15W power drain allowed), but if you connect a third NvME drive to some Notebooks (even designed with 4 Thunderbolt ports) Intel or Apple Silicon, the third Thunderbolt/USB drive may simply be “ignored” (actually it is actively prevented to activate on better hardware), or - sometimes - being - ahem - “usable”, but…. the moment all three drives is entering into active use (let’s take worse case: three parallel copies from internal SSD to external NvME based Thunderbolt/USB 4 drive) the system may behave erratic from time to time (writes may not behave ideally in all situations either).

I assume, that the camera “discovers” the potential for a too large power drain, and rather than risking erratic behaviour, simply “rejects use” of the (potential) unreliable recording media. Preventing a probable problem in “once in a lifetime” situations due to periodically too large power drain.

The iPhones and iPads have very reliable ways of preventing probable overload situations. Maybe the camera also just tries to “stay alive”?

If you have access to USB C dives designed to low power use - example: Samsung T7 Shield 4TB (10 GBit) - you’ll probably discover, that there is no problem in ordinary use.

Not even the “weak chested” iPhone 15 Pro will get into problems after recording ProRES 422HQ 25fps UHD 2020 HLG to external SSD in 34C (high humidity, tropical climate, shadow or night).

Regards

While I have not tried the ORICO enclosures for M2 yet, I have tried them for the SSDs and they work. This one is might work as it is USB 3.1.

https://www.amazon.com/ORICO-NVMe-Enclo ... th=1&psc=1

Hi,

You're not going to get any speed advantages as we use a 5Gbps USB port

It's more a matter of having a higher speed drive to edit from or dump footage with on the PC side. I understand the Blackmagic camera is limited to 5gbps.

Duplicate post

I've come across some threads that deal with this:

u/StephenStrangeWare wrote:

"Has anyone out there been able to use a BMDPCC 6K G2 record 6K footage on anything but an internal CFast card?
…Any thoughts on enclosure-mounted NVME drives?"

condog1035 wrote:

"I've heard they work pretty well for BRAW. The sabrent rocket drives are pretty nice and the small rig enclosure is popular.

Not all nvme drives are created equal, though, so do some research before buying one. Some only hit their max speed for a little bit and then choke and force recording to stop. Avoid QLC flash as it is still fairly slow, but TLC memory works much better now than a couple years ago."

r/cinematography Recording 6K on Anything but a CFast Card - Possible? Or Forget It?

https://www.reddit.com/r/cinematography ... fast_card/

I assumed that this poster was using a BMPCC 6K shooting 6K:

u/NIGERlAN_PRINCE wrote:

"Decided to see what, if any differences there are in transfer speeds and the ability to shoot at certain quality levels when using a fast SSD vs a cfast card. I recorded for 30 minutes in each test, formatting the card/ssd each time.

Here are the results. Tested at 8000 iso to increase noise and file size in constant quality modes.

…SSD (WD SN850X with Sabrent USB enclosure: LINK(SABRENT USB 3.2 10Gbps Type C Tool Free Enclosure for M.2 PCIe NVMe and SATA SSDs (EC-SNVE))):

Q0 50p 17 seconds before dropped frame.

Q0 50p 6 seconds before dropped frame.

Q0 30p 30 minutes no drop.

Q0 24p 30 minutes no drop.

Q1 50p 27 minutes before dropped frame.

--

3:1 50p 5 seconds before dropped frame.

3:1 50p 6 seconds before dropped frame.

3:1 30p 30 minutes no drop.

3:1 24p 30 minutes no drop.

I chose the SN850X because it has a very good sustained write speed and the Samsung 970 Evo Plus was giving me problems. The Sabrent enclosure was chosen because it has the new RTL9210B controller, the update to the RTL9210 which has proven more reliable than some of the alternatives according to some forum posts (e.g., JMS583). For all tests I set the camera looking at a screen with a movie playing (Braveheart) to maximize the data rate (which is important for Q0)."

r/bmpcc NVMe M.2 vs CFAST

https://www.reddit.com/r/bmpcc/comments ... _vs_cfast/

The WD SN850X NVMe M.2 SSDs might use less power than other models.

This might be worth trying - 1TB WD Black SN750 SE NVMe Gen 4 Solid State Drive SSD. This SSD is recommended for recording 12K DCI Blackmagic RAW 8:1 at up to 30 frames per second for the URSA Mini Pro 12K when using a M.2 to U.2 adapter and a Blackmagic URSA Mini Recorder. This recorder uses a USB-C 3.1 gen 2 port on the camera. The gen. 2 port has a maximum bitrate of 10 GB/s.

This SSD is advertised as using 30% less power than previous drives. This might be important when recording to BM cameras.

MarkE1130 wrote:

"UPDATE to old thread. Problem solved. Want to record 6K @ 50fps all day long at Q0 setting ?

Warning the file sizes are huge. about 28-30G per min. But yes you can record to a SSD at those rates and the BMPCC 6k loves it.

What SSD will do that you ask. I saw this guy take an Inland Platinum 4TB SSD M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 3.0 x 4 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive and put it into a cheap asus SSD case : ASUS ROG STRIX Arion Aluminum Alloy M.2 NVMe SSD External Portable Enclosure Case Adapter, USB 3.2 Gen 2 Type-C (10 Gbps), USB-C to C and USB-C to A Cables, Fits PCIe 2280/2260/2242/2230 M Key/B+M Key.

Drive is $479 for 4TB and Case was $57. Both came same day on amazon. I knew just the test. See if that 6k BRAW could choke yet another SSD. What's the point of having a setting no media will support.

formatted it up in exFAT, plugged it into BMPCC 6k usb port and camera said 340 minutes of record time on drive.Saw it no problem. Set it to be primary record drive, Set camera to constant Quality Q0, engage HFR at 50 fps...........I stopped it after 7 minutes of continuous recording because it was getting ridiculous. That SSD is rated at 3400 MB/sec read and 3000 MB/sec write. Best $500 i ever spent for this great little camera. And it's not even approved recording media. Running camera version 7.3 I think. The latest. Hands down best SSD for BMPCC 6k."

Re:BMPCC 6k stops recording in 6k 50 frames

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=105025&p=782510&hilit=+Platinum+4TB+SSD+M.2+2280+NVMe+#p782510

The firmware level could impact the ability to recognize NVMe SSDs:

laozhao43 wrote:

"I bought a Teamgroup MS30 1TB SLC SATA and used a SSK SE-C370 enclosure with origianl cable.
Tested on two BMPCC 4K and the behaviors are the same: BMPCC 4k can successfully detect external SSD and record at highest quality for 30+ mins with no issue when the firmware version is at 6.9.6

Upgrading to newer firmware will cause BMPCC 4K not detect recognize SSD at all.

Note: I tried 7.3 and 7.9.1 both won't work. The SSD is formatted by BMPCC 4K in exFAT format."

r/bmpcc BMPCC4K With SATA M.2 SSD in SSK SE-C370 Enclosure. Failed To Detect SSD After 6.9.6 Firmware

https://www.reddit.com/r/bmpcc/comments ... enclosure/

While I have not tried the ORICO enclosures for M2 yet, I have tried them for the SSDs and they work. This one is might work as it is USB 3.1.

https://www.amazon.com/ORICO-NVMe-Enclo ... th=1&psc=1

Yes 3.1, 3.2 and 3.2x2 seem to work, but not USB 4. Just wanted to see if this was a bug or a known limitation. No change with 8.6

I've come across some threads that deal with this:

formatted it up in exFAT, plugged it into BMPCC 6k usb port and camera said 340 minutes of record time on drive.

Re:BMPCC 6k stops recording in 6k 50 frames

The firmware level could impact the ability to recognize NVMe SSDs:

Upgrading to newer firmware will cause BMPCC 4K not detect recognize SSD at all.

Note: I tried 7.3 and 7.9.1 both won't work. The SSD is formatted by BMPCC 4K in exFAT format."

It's not a matter of the nmve drive being too slow to record 6K footage as I'm using the same drives as before that were previously working. I'm talking about new enclosures with the same drive being incompatible with the camera. If you use these drives it will not show up in the storage section at all, even the cheapest sd card I've got shows up so it's not a matter of speed testing on boot either.