emusonacid!

I have the need to connect 4 samplers pls some external drives up to my Mac to dump samples down via SCSI and also make CD backups of my work but doing so in a single chain results in way too many SCSI devices.

The devices requiring connection are: Mac, Zip Drive, CDROM, E4XT, e6400 x 2 and an ESi-32+external HD.

The Mac, Zip drive and the CDR need to be common to all four samplers and there is also a Jaz drive that could fit in there but it isn't essential.

I thought about maybe using a manual switch box to switch the Mac/ZIP/CDR between the samplers effectivle leaving only one sampler on the chain at point in time but I have some concerns about perfroming the switch action with everthing still turned on. I think SCSI termination of the samplers that are not switched in may also be an issue.

Has anybody here got any experience with multiple samplers on one SCSI chain? I'd be interested any thoughts or suggestions.

Cheers,
Adam-V

You can only have 7 SCSI devices on a chain. Do you definitely need the ESi-32? It doesn't do anything the e6400's can't do.

The ESi really just gives me an extra sampler to use coz 3 EOS machines just really isn't enough!

buy an Ultra-Wide SCSI card for 14 devices...

A good suggestion but I don't think that's going to work since all of the devices to be connected are SCSI 1 and only capable of addressing SCSI ID0 - ID7. Or is there something special about Ultra Wide SCSI that gets around this?

I have investigated the possibilty of using several SCSI cards, one for each sampler. I've tested this with two cards + two samplers and it works really well thus solving the issue of SMDI dumps however I still need an easy way of sharing a zip drive and CDROM drive between them all.

It is quite possible that the only way to achieve this is with a manual switch box and just turn everything off, make the selection then turn them all on again when I want to use the ZIP drive and CDR on a different sampler.