emusonacid! legacy

Been thinking of getting an external scsi drive for my e-5000. I was reading the pdf for OS 4.7 and it said basically that i cant connect a FAT formatted scsi harddrive to my E-5000 AND my PC because it could cause data corruption or something unpleasant sounding.
Does this only apply to FAT formatted external SCSI HDs? What about regular emu formatted drives?

I like to transfer my samples from the PC via SCSI and if i could hook the sampler into the HD and then the HD into the PC...that would be ideal.

thanks

It only applies to FAT32 formatted hard drives. Regular E-mu EOS formatted drives can be in the chain just fine, because the computer won't see a validly formatted hard drive (and, hopefully, will just ignore it... although it's always hard to tell with Windows operating systems because Microsoft insists that it knows better than the users what the users really want, and frequently tries to be "helpful" at the most inconvenient times)

Oh, I should probably stop ranting... (and excuse the lengthy posts, but I'm a writer and tend to get carried away with my words)

The main worry is having the computer, as a master device, and the sampler, as another master device, trying to address the hard drive at the same time. SCSI doesn't normally allow more than one master device on a chain at the same time, and the conflict is what might cause the data corruption that the manual refers to (as the hard drive gets confused about who's in charge and tries to kill itself... hard drives are notoriously emotional things, and you really need to be gentle with them or they get scared). EOS works around this because essentially the EOS formatted hard drive becomes an un-readable device as far as the computer is concerned and it just ignores it (the sampler puts on a hat that says "I'm not a master device", the computer is happy in its ignorence, and the SCSI hardware in the external drive box just routes SCSI transmissions from the computer through to the sampler as if the drive wasn't even there, while the sampler can still talk to the external drive box just fine).

The down side is that the EOS formatted drives can only address a maximum of 18GB of drive space.

Do you already have an internal drive in the e5000? If not, you might try getting an IDE drive for the inside, since the IDE bus isn't shared at all (the computer couldn't see the drive even if it wanted to, so no conflict). Then the internal drive could be formatted for FAT32 and be much larger than 18GB (I've got a FAT32 formatted 40Gb IDE drive in my e6400-Ultra). Unfortunately, the internal SCSI bus is on the same chain as the external SCSI connection, so you'd run into the same problems as with an external SCSI drive.

There is a chance that everything would be just fine, as long as nothing on the computer tried to access the FAT32 external drive while the sampler is accessing it (so turning off auto-update things and such). It's when the drive gets two access requests from different masters at the same time that things go all apocalyptic. **PLEASE** Do not take my word for this, as my grasp of the intricacies of the SCSI protocol are sketchy at best. This is why I use words like "a chance", any risk is yours to take, you have been warned, etc...

how about this instead

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... &rd=1&rd=1

lordtoranaga wrote:how about this instead

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... &rd=1&rd=1

$70 for a used 20GB Maxtor drive??? Looks like a bargain!!! If i was stupid enough i'd so go for it!

you are kinda stupid, because it is a whole kit .

With the added bonus that the kit includes the correctly oriented power cable (so you don't have to get into rigging one yourself)...

And I think <radioactive> was referring to the fact you could get a new Western Digital 40Gb drive and rig your own mounting kit for less (that's what I did... not least of which because there were no E-mu mounting kits on offer... but cludging the power cable was a bit of a pain; had to cut one out of an old PC power supply I had lying around, swap the polarity myself)