emusonacid!

Also the flash ram drives here (scroll to the bottom of the page) look interesting, cheaper too:

http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=16#2609

Plus you could get the cheapest first to test compatibility - highly recommended (testing) if my experience is anything to go by.

after a little thinking and reading I'm beginning to think the issue is ATAPI...

Although the instructions with the compact flash adapter are clear the device will appear as a ide hard disk and that you must not hot swap cfs as a result, the drive appears as removable under windows...

a discussion here on zip drives states that the emu doesn't support atapi...

Now I don't know much about IDE/ATAPI/DMA (wikipedia trek coming up) so ATAPI could just be a few commands that allow you to eject or a complete protocol for communicating with removable drives that bears no relation to the way a device communicates with a hard disk. Anyway this seems like my prime suspect. I feel a big splurg on yet another cf adapter coming on...

After a little further testing with a cf I'm sure supports dma (sansdisk ultra)and a different adapter and a few discussions with suppliers I'm at the end of my travels in cf in an emu territory.

It seems that the cf is always presented as removable and I assume this is what creates the issue for the emu.

Now if only someone did a scsi version...

Hey rod, what about something like a Flash Path adapter? Do you think they would work? I'm not sure if they require drivers or anything.

http://www.streettech.com/archives_hard ... hPath.html

that article seems to imply that they do (need drivers). I'd imagine our emus would be expecting 1.44 mb on a floppy and would need a litle help when coming to terms with gbs but I might be wrong. At the moment those flash ide disks (not cf adapters) look the most promising flash devices but they dont offer a simple removable option which makes a quiet laptop drive look a better deal overall.

Hi All,

using an IDE to CF adapter in our emus looks damn good for a silent operation, especially considering the amazingly low prices on that kind of items on eBay. I have seen such stuff selling for 1 euro/piece and with a shipping fee of 5 euros. I guess for 10 quids you could get 5 of these + s/h.

However.. I don't want to spoil the party but I think Emusers should be aware that flash memory technology (i.e any chip currently found in memory stick, compact flash, MMC, SD and so on) has a limited amount of write/erase cycles (reading is fine). That means that a heavy use of the compact flash card would lead it to die on you at some time. Of course, that kind of failure is not so obvious to notice as only some blocks would die at first but that's the beginning of trouble.
So my only advice would be the usual one: backup, backup & backup!

In the end, it is no very big deal but I would not like Emusers to have nasty surprises. It is no reason to worry too much because the lifespan of the card would anyway be quite long (it all depends on the use you make of your sampler).

Xavier

Ahh yes, you are right. Sorry, I guess I shoulda finished reading that article first.

Well, if anyone finds out a means of having some type of flash media to replace the floppy drive, I'd love to know. I agree with xab, yes flash media will not last forever but, neither do floppies or zips.

Just to tie this up again, I'm 99% certain* cf ide adapters wont ever work in a 4.7 or earlier eos machine as I believe the cf presents itself as ATAPI. An ide flash drive MAY work as it may well be manufactured without ATAPI as it presumably never needs to be removable. If I'm feeling generous I'll try out a flash drive in the pursuit of wisdom (a laptop drive is now my prefered solution). But if anyone wants the silent non removable flash solution their first port of call should be trying one of those drives available at the bottom of this linked page.
http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=16#2609

* 1% opportunity lies in using a cf > ide adapter with a ide > scsi adapter. If I'm feeling stupidly philanthropic I'll try that out in the pursuit of lunacy...

If anyone knows of a plain CF > scsi adapter let them speak up...

Hi Rod,

from this article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atapi) it appears that IDE=ATA=ATAPI. If you dig a bit more in the article, you will see that ATAPI is in fact a kind of superset of IDE/ATA that aimed at (as you pointed out) managing removable media. However, my belief would be that for backward compatibility reasons, an ATAPI device being sent IDE/ATA commands would handle them and act as a fixed drive. Do you share this point of view ?
Regards,
Xavier

http://www.adtron.com/products/S25fa.html

They are out there... this is just one that I found via google.

Now why didn't I think of that?

xab

sort of yes. But I dont think that helps. If you intend to support a removable drive then I guess you need to do the atapi stuff to get it to work properly e.g. avoid your sampler crashing when the file system isn't laid out as anticipated because you swapped the media. There may be some protocol for acknowledging the host supports ATAPI, but even if not I'm sure a host could check if a device supports ATAPI and reject it (because the host hasn't got any code to handle removable media and the host's designers dont want you to crash).

This is a guess on my part given I'd have done the same thing if I was working to a deadline and saw no real benefit to the addition. Ide was really there to reduce the unit cost, support for the common removable media formats of the time was provided via scsi.

Speculation apart my experience alone leads me to believe my emu e5000 circa 1999 does not work with ATAPI drives, plus I've read someone else say something similar re zips on this very board (so it must be true!).


And finally I'll repeat myself for clarity:

If anyone knows of a plain CF* > scsi adapter let them speak up...

*Compact Flash memory card

And if anyone wants an inexpensive fixed flash drive either wait for me to bother testing one linked above or bite the bullet and test one out yourself - and report back to us.

I'm hoping that appropriate switches to the power linkages to a SCSI-IDE-CF adaptor or adaptor chain would see devices being able to be removed without powering down a sampler full of unsaved samply goodness.

Even if not, it would be worth having a reliable silent 512Mb device that could be easily swapped depending on which sampler was using the space.

Has anyone used any of the SCSI-IDE magic adaptors in earlier Emus like the E64?

B>

I don't understand...

http://www.adtron.com/products/S25fa.html

This is a straight SCSI to CF adapter... why go from SCSI to IDE to CF?

CF is more convenient for transferring files around and is also quieter.