Max HD capacity for Mackie SDR 2496 you've been using?

[Christof]

Hi all,

I'd like to know the max. capacity the SDR 2496 could adress in a Mackie media tray - is it limited to any amount or could you even use high capacity HDs (500 GB)?

What has been the highest capacity you've been using without any problems?

Thank you!

[Gerax]

The SDR manual originally stated that the SDR could use drives up to 1Tb. I've used 250Gb without any issues, and I guess you can try loading a 500Gb without too much fear. If that's not a new drive I'd make sure to have a backup of the files, and then let the SDR format it.

If you try let me know, as I also have an SDR, so I'm curious.

Hope this helps

L.G.

[Christof]

Thanks - 250GB is quite good - but I can't find any information about the max. capacity in the manual...

[Gerax]

I don't have the manual at hand, so I cannot check that out, but I remeber it was thoroughly disucssed on the Mackie forum, Maybe you want to chaeck that out.

[Christof]

Thanks - searched the Mackie forum and found an interesting post:

About the HD size. The maximum theoretical value is 2TB.

I'm using 200GB and 400GB drives with no problem at all.

You only need to partition and format the drives in FAT 32.

Be aware that using XP you can only format drives using FAT32 up to 32GB. Also using a boot disk with the original FDISK utility you can go only up to 120GB.

The best way I found to overcome this limit is using an utility that bypasses XP FAT32 limitation so you can partition and format any drive up to 2TB using FAT32. You just run it from a regular XP machine.

You can find it at

http://www.ridgecrop.demon.co.uk/index.htm?fat32format.htm

but there are many more like SwissKnife

http://www.compuapps.com/download/Swissknife/swissknife.htm

If you're running a Linux machine there's also lot of utilities capable to do that if supported by the motherboard which is true for about all the new ones (since about 4 years to now).

My only sugestion is to find a good drive with 8MB of cache.

What I did is to assemble a Lian Li's RH-58 inside a Lindy Firewire/USB external case so I can use it on my Macintosh or PC.

The 5.25 external enclosure I'm using is made by Lindy

www.lindy.com%2Fint%2Fproductfolder%2F04%2F42924%2Findex.php

But there are many more in many flavours like eSata, Firewire 800 and so.

Hope that helps
Zé

[Gerax]

Hey

As you can see from the picture below I'm already using a sandard drive caddy and bay on my SDR, which allows me to swap the drives with my main Pro Tools PC in the studio. In 5+ years it's been flawless. The only issue is that Win XP has some troubles handling too large FAT32 drives. What I do is create the main partition (the whole disk) in Windows and then let the SDR format the disk.
I now have a main laptop based PT rig, so the SDR works as my backup, but when I used to use it as my main I just copied the files form the removable FAT32 drive to the PC's internal NTFS audio drive and all has been good.
This system has been working so reliable for me that I hope P-ATA drives remain available many years from now (though I have a small spare supply).

http://www.protoolers.com/forum/pict...0&pictureid=61

Cheers