for your old floppy drive based gear...floppy disk emulator

[twonabomber]

i'm probably the only one who will find this useful, with my Roland samplers, but it's cool anyways.

pull the old floppy drive out of your gear and replace it with this:



and store your files on an SD card instead of those old floppies. instead of a box full of disks, all the images can fit on a card. images can be selected and loaded via the three buttons.

one small problem...it's not any faster, since it emulates a floppy. and it's a little pricey, but a lot easier than trying to find the special drives Roland used in the old S series. grungy 12-bit sample goodness forever!

store linky http://www.lotharek.pl/product.php?pid=42

compatability list http://hxc2001.free.fr/floppy_drive_...or/support.htm

i was able to score an SCSI card reader for my S-760 and transfer all my disks to CF cards. pretty much acts as a hard drive and beats having to swap disks all the time.

[Hardrock69]

That is wild.

I recently discovered that I could buy IDE to SD card adapters that I could install in my Roland VS-1680. It will only handle a maximum of 16GB of stoarge space, and a 16 gig flash drive is what, about 12 or 13 bucks?

Only problem is that flash cards are not designed for the massive amounts of read/write cycles that would occur, and could be expected to last more than a year tops.
Basically the post I saw concerning this was suggesting substituting an SD card for a hard drive. Wish it were more reliable, or I would do it in a heartbeat. I only have the original 3.2 gig HD in my Roland. But then, I don't use it for more than just tracking....then I transfer everything to my PC for mixing, etc. in Reaper.

Glad there is stuff out there to adapt to the older technology like this. Hell, they quit making the VS-1680 in the late 90s....mine is probably almost 20 years old!

[twonabomber]

i read that about the write cycles, too. thing is, my S-760 only recognizes a hard drive of 600 MB. i read elsewhere that readers can recognize bad sectors and not write to those. so with a handful of 2 gig CF cards, theoretically i should be okay. and they are stupid cheap on Ebay, i can use a couple as backups, or just dump everything to the computer and burn 'em on a data disc.

i figure the sampler hits the CF card once to boot, then when i load or save data. even if i used it a few times a week i don't think i'd max out the r/w cycle.

i bought my S-50 in '90 or '91 and every time i power it up i wonder if the drive is going to work...i love the feel of the board so i use it as a controller but it doesn't do anything without the OS loaded.

i have an S-10 too, but it will load sounds via MIDI and can be used as a controller upon powering up. that one runs on a Quick Disk drive and those are beyond hard to find. i bought a belt for it on Ebay, it's the same drive used in the old Nintendo Famicom Disk systems.

[Nitro Express]

Magnetic storage is proven to be pretty durable. I found an old cassette tape recorded in the late 1960's that has me as a kid talking into it and it's still good. Unless you get a magnet by them or you have mechanical failure of the cassette they still should be good. Floppies are even better because there is not much to go wrong with them mechanically. I mean we still are using hard drives for long-term storage for a reason. I had one completely fail but they still could get the information off the disk.

I'm glad to see DVD's and CD's go away. I had nothing but problems with them and the drives seemed to break all the time too.

I love the portable digital memory devices for convenience but I wouldn't trust them for long-term storage.

Going back in time I don't think I ever had a problem with a floppy disk or drive. I used them a ton in the day. In fact I was using some accounting software and thought it was poorly written and thought the stuff written in the old days of DOS was so much better and actually more reliable. The stuff now has automation and a bunch of extra features that they think you want but it just gets in the way. The old DOS stuff never did funny automatic manipulations of your data and was as solid as a brick shit house. I would go back to running an old IBM AT running SST software in a hot minute for managing payroll and keeping ledgers and making financial reports over what they have now for Windows. In some ways the old stuff was better for just good old data crunching and storage. I was doing payroll for employees that worked in multiple states and the state income tax accounting right there was a nightmare.

[SunisinuS]

Just buy the Cube. Well that is not quite invented yet....but my friend says any day now.

[Hardrock69]

I always wanted to get one of those fucking Cell processors to put in a PC. They have something like 120 cores.
Man....the technology is just hitting fast and furious! Woot!

I always wanted a Time Machine.....that is, a machine that is so fucking fast it does shit BEFORE you tell it to.