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Photron | FASTdrive FASTdock

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Tech Imaging is pleased to announce the immediate availability of an optional solid state drive (SSD) interface called FAST Drive for the FASTCAM SA-Z camera. FAST Drive provides one terabyte of hot swappable, local, non-volatile memory to which images can be rapidly transferred from the SA-Z. ...Read more
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Tech Imaging is pleased to announce the immediate availability of an optional solid state drive (SSD) interface called FAST Drive for the FASTCAM SA-Z camera. FAST Drive provides one terabyte of hot swappable, local, non-volatile memory to which images can be rapidly transferred from the SA-Z. A camera operator can record images into the internal memory of the SA-Z to capture a high speed event and then transfer those images to the FAST Drive with no PC connection.

Because the image transfer is performed so quickly, the camera “downtime” between high-speed video recordings is very small.

Optional FAST Dock

As mentioned above, images can be uploaded from the FAST Drive SSD to a PC without removing the SSD from the SA-Z camera. This is a convenient way to upload images, but the camera is “out of pocket” and cannot be used for capturing additional video sequences until the upload is completed.

Another way to upload images to a PC is to remove the SSD from the SA-Z camera and connect it to a Photron FAST Dock using the FAST Drive Cable. The FAST Dock is connected to the PC via a standard USB-3 cable. Photron FASTCAM Viewer (PFV) software is used to initiate the image upload.

Unlike the SD Card or Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, the FAST Drive interface does not decrease image transfer speed when reduced resolution images are saved to the SSD from the SA-Z.  In fact, the overall transfer time is actually shortened for reduced resolution images.  This is because at the beginning of each image transfer, an image correction data file is saved onto the SSD.  The time required to save this file varies by resolution, and larger resolution image correction data files take longer to save than smaller resolution image correction data files.  

For example a 1024 x 1024 pixel image correction data file takes 6 seconds to transfer, while a 128 x 128 pixel image correction data file takes just 1 second to transfer.  If you exclude the image correction data file, the image transfer speed is the same for all image resolutions – approximately 910 megabytes per second, or 9 seconds per 8GB of images.

 

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