emusonacid! legacy

I'm looking around for a hard drive for an E6400-Ultra I recently bought, but I'm having a little trouble sussing out one that satisfies the specs. So I need some advice...

-Assume for the moment that I'm looking for an IDE drive (as they're a lot easier to find than SCSI ones these days... and fewer connection formats to worry about).

-Capacity needs to be at least 12 or so GB (and less than 18, obviously... although I'm assuming that I could take a 20GB drive and the sampler will just format it to 18... seems a bit wasteful to take a 40GB and only use 18 of that)

-Power (this is where I'm having the most problems) - E-mu state on their web site that the sampler can only provide a maximum 1.7 A /12V. Pretty much all the drives I've looked at specs for need 1.8 A on spin-up (or more), which takes them out of the running.

Can anybody recommed a good model of drive? (even better, if you're in Canada or the Toronto area, recommend a good place to shop for drives)


PS... have Quantum gotten out of the hard drive business?

If you're going go IDE I recommend getting a 2.5" laptop drive and a 2.5" to 3.5" adaptor kit (they're cheap). I use EOS4.7 and an 80 GIG Seagate 2.5" 5400 RPM 8meg cache HD in my e6400 Ultra. EOS4.7 will support drives upto 127GIG or the limit of the FAT32 filesystem. If you dont want to use EOS4.7 then you will be restricted to 18GIG EOS format HD's.

127GB!!?!

Damn... and here I was believing the E-mu web site when it said the limit was 18GB. Then again, E-mu never officially endorsed EOS 4.7, so I guess it wouldn't get much mention by them.

As it turns out, 4.7 is what I'm running on the Ultra anyway, so that I could use a FAT32 formatted Zip100 to transfer banks to my PC.

OK, next question... can EOS 4.7 back up an EOS format drive to a FAT32 format drive? (so that I can back up the drive in my older E6400 classic (on the SCSI bus) to the new drive in the Ultra (on the IDE bus)...)

EDIT: Or I could just RTFM... D'oh! Never mind, answer on page 5 of the PDF.

So - if I understand that correctly - say someone is using the latest stable EOS 4.62 - and they get a 2.5/3.5 inch kit plus a 40GB drive then that will work BUT only the 18GB limit will be used?

If that is the case (again assuming EOS 4.62) then 18GB is plenty - plus of course IDE drives are very cheap so one would not be too worried with losing some capacity.

(reason I say 4.6 is that I hear that 4.7 had some issues.)

Yes, with any EOS under 4.7, you will only be able to address 18GB of any hard drive you install (SCSI or IDE), even if the actual capacity of the drive is much higher.

Yes, 4.7 has some issues, but only if you have the RFX-32 card installed in an Ultra model sampler. If you don't have the RFX, you're in the clear for 4.7

Yes, IDE drives are dead cheap, and a lot easier to find than SCSI drives (not counting used sources like eBay... but I'd rather have a new drive I can trust). I think I paid a little under $50 (Canadian $... slightly smaller than US $) for my 40G drive (Western Digital).

And, yes, 18GB probably is plenty of space. I'm still only using about 5GB of the 40GB drive I installed (which, when formatted under EOS 4.7, gives about 38Gb capacity). It really comes down to how big your library of samples is. I still have about 20Gb of stuff I want to transfer over from my PC (samples only, still need to build presets around them... not that I necessarily need them, but it's nice to have variety at your finger tips).

All that being said, when I bought the E6400-Ultra it had NO hard drive installed at all. The previous user only used a connected SCSI CD drive to load banks. This might suit some peoples' needs perfectly, but it involves a lot of disc swapping and (slightly) slower load times. And it would be a pain in the a$$ to combine presets from different discs into a single bank you use regularly (effectively, you'd have to recreate the custom bank every time you power on the machine, if you couldn't save it to a hard drive).

But I digress...

So... uh... hope that answered any lingering questions...

WOW!

What a GREAT reply and that has perfectly addressed my question!!

Thank you so much - even though a lot of this has been discussed on the forums before - your explanation drove it home to me!

:)

Now all I got to do is work whether this can be achieved (external or internal) with my E4K, ESI-2000 or EIV!!

Questions, questions, questions.

Thanks so much. Brilliant.

:)

Sorry to be obtuse...

But are there any ways to hook up a larger EXTERNAL hard disk to either the E4K or EIV or ESI-2000?

They are all non-Ultra obviously...

Sorry for the intrusion.

Hmm... that might be a little trickier. It should be possible, if you can find a larger external SCSI drive. Or an external enclosure that has a SCSI interface on the outside and whatever drive type connection inside (might be a way to put an IDE drive in a SCSI external case... but I don't know all that much about SCSI enclosures, or even if they make on with IDE or such on the inside).

Probably easier to find an external SCSI enclosure and a SCSI hard drive to go inside it (or already in it).

With either of these two solutions, the SCSI in the sampler will just see it the same way as an internal SCSI drive (they all connect to the one SCSI bus, which is why an internal drive takes one of the IDs from the SCSI chain), and you'll still be limited to 18Gb addressing regardless of the actual drive capacity.

At least, that's the way I understand to work... anybody else confirm/deny?